One of the things I have enjoyed doing since moving to rural Maryland is attending the Great Frederick Fair. Earlier this week, I made my second trip – I attended last year, two months after moving.

For me, it’s a great place for creating pictures using some of my favorite inspirations – signs, lights, machines & equipment, food, people in candid situations, animals, and life after dark, to name a few.

The sights and sounds and smells blend into a wonderful blend of life. It was a little unnerving to have to eat my delicious roast beef sandwich from Hemp’s (the justly-heralded Jefferson, MD butcher shop) while sitting across from the beef barn with all the cows inside, but I managed. I love seeing all the kids – boys AND girls -climbing up on the tractors and big Cat machinery and sitting pretty. The old Minneapolis-Moline tractors in the vintage equipment area look so orange and pretty and members of the greatest generation look at them with fond remembrance, perhaps of boyhoods spent on one just like it.

The army, the Baptists, the Dems and Repubs are all there recruiting. You can get just about anything deep-fried, including corn on the cob. You can buy a tractor, a hot tub, storm windows, a Honda, a weathervane, a Confederate flag, a cowboy hat, feed, knives, or peace sign hoop earrings. You can hear Billy Ray Cyrus or Josh Turner singing, even if you’re not in the grandstand.

Once it’s dark, the midway is bright, packed and amazing. Fly up to the sky in a boat with Pharoah’s head. Try to stand up a bottle with a fishing pole with a ring and get a prize. Shoot out the middle of the target at Machine Gun Alley. Ride the Tornado, the Gravitron, the Tango or the Yoyo. High school kids posin’ on a Friday night. Packs of girls squealing at one thing or another. Boys talking big about stuff for which they really have no clue. Older folks playing Bingo , dads trying to break balloons for their kids. Great stuff for an itchy camera trigger finger.

A thought today to the souls lost that day and for the collective hurt endured by all. May prayer flags all over the planet flap a little harder sending their prayers to the universe.

As always, I will listen to the three songs that resonate the loudest for me – Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Grand Central Station, Lucy Kaplansky’s Land of the Living and Alan Jackson’s Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).

Stranded away from loved ones, in North Carolina on the business of books, I remember the other folks in the same situation at the Spring Hill Suites. Gathered around the breakfast room tv set, just watching, not talking…wondering when we’d be able to get home….later that week, trying to get our business done, sleepwalking through it. Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Cary, Durham, visiting nice booksellers in nice towns, talking about everything and nothing and wondering what it all meant.

Finally, almost a week later, being able to catch Amtrak home, 15 hours on a train getting more delayed each hour we were on it. I remember reading two books – cheap thrill mysteries. My seat mate was on his way to New York – he was one of the original engineers on the towers, rolled-up blueprints in his hands, opening them, showing me where he thought people might be – still with hope that there were people to be found. Nobody’s brain was totally wrapped around the thought of most of the tower dwellers now being merely dust. Arriving at 30th St Station in Philly at 1 am with my best friend there to meet me.

Everyone was nice to each other. Nothing was too much trouble. Let’s Roll was a mantra that rose out of a Pennsylvania field.Young people enlisted, even NFL players. They started playing baseball again, men in pinstripes lining the base paths for ceremonies and remembrances, grown tough men with tears running down their cheeks as they watched waving flags carried by cops and firefighters…the finest and the bravest…God Bless America in the 7th inning of every game. Everyone remembered how much they loved their country and that people continue to die defending it…or die just because they live here. We must go on, everyone said, or THEY will WIN….

It seems like yesterday and it seems like a lifetime ago, too. A lot of people aren’t very nice to each other anymore. Everything is too much trouble. Nobody trusts anybody. The economy is dust, there are no jobs to be had and everyone still lives in terror – but of not finding a job or losing the one they have. There is hatred and noise and division in all the ranks. Frightening climates are taking shape – the scientific kind, the political kind, the social kind.

I wish for the unity that everyone felt for a couple of weeks those eight years ago, but we’re farther apart than ever. It it maddening. It is madness.

Madison, VA

We’re back from Madison, VA, where on Friday and Saturday we were lucky enough to be part of the grand opening of the Madison Arts Exchange. Twelve artists, including 4 photographers, were showcased in the inaugural weekend exhibit held in conjunction with the annual Taste of the Mountains Festival in Madison, in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

MadArts, as the venue is lovingly called, will open periodically – the next time being October 17th – and is still evolving. I feel blessed to be a part of a group of very talented artists being lovingly shepherded by MadArts owner Janine Jensen. We got a tremendous amount of local press and publicity in the Madison and Charlottesville areas, as well as a plug in my area weekly, The Brunswick Citizen (Brunswick, MD).

My prints were very well received, and I savored the fact that I sold some prints of varying sizes – and loved finding out about the destinations of two of them…. one (a shot of the old post office in Clark County, VA on US 340)will be on a very nice person’s office wall, and one (a small print of carousel horses at Glen Echo Park, DC) will hang in the beautiful nursery room of a newborn beauty in NC named Neila.

An exciting future lies ahead for MadArts, and I look forward to being part of it.