"UP THE CREEK"- A Few Stories from Gainesville's Rattlesnake Creek Neighborhood

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                                                        UP THE CREEK

An Occasional  Neighborhood Newsletter- July, '23

   Everyone's hiding from the heat this summer. I'm doing my best to poke around to see what's going on. The biggest news is the opening of Denise's barber shop.

    While the outside looks a bit funky the inside is clean and pleasant. Here I am posing with,"Larry", the gentlemen who

keeps the place lookin' good. 

    Its gotten great reviews online  One says, "Denise has a pretty face and she knows how to cut hair". I'm sure its worth a trip to Melrose.

HOUSING continues to be a major problem in every American city.  It's the homeless, unaffordable rent and home prices, and

so much more.  Looking for answers, "Gainesville Neighborhood Voices" has formed a group to comes up with solutions.  We had our first roundtable discussion last month. We'll have another in a few weeks.

  

Isn't RING PARK special? Our creeks, like the one there, are one of our city's greatest assets. The Alachua Conservation Trust has a subcommittee working to preserve all of our city's greenways (the flood zone land next our creeks). Much of it is forested land on private property. We are trying to get the City to use the $8 million in its tree mitigation fund to purchase land next to the creeks. This will preserve these properties for future generations.

 Want PRETTY PLANTS?  We love our front porch coleus's because they're bright as flowers all the time. The cuttings  grow easily. 

 Its time to trim them back. If you want any let us know.

LONELY?  Get a dog.  I was driving by the county's dog pound and decided to stop last week.  I checked out the homeless pooches.  70% are pit bulls and most of them seem,mmm, quite angry. For $50 you can get a pit or, one of these sweethearts.

When you pass by the sad-eyed orphans you wants to take them all home.  

I did see one, "Freddy", get adopted by a happy couple. I took a picture of them getting their picture taken.

Freddy and his new family had much to celebrate, including this month's Big Event,

 

the FOURTH OF JULY. It rolled by without too much fanfair in Gainesville. It had the usual "Let's Roast in the

Sun Concert" on campus, followed by fireworks.

 Micanopy had its charming parade (why doesn't G'ville have one too?).

    After the parades are over what do you do on a

HOT DAY IN GAINESVILLE ?

    You can sit in the shade by Rattlesnake Creek. If you'd like to cool off and get a skin disease you can lay down in its cool, flowing water produced by street run off.  

 

If you'd like your water clean you can take a dip one of our springs, or, in the new pool at Westside Park.  It cost just four bucks (half that if you're hair has lost its color).

 

Drinking cold beer and listening to live music at Satchel's Pizza works for me.  When I visited last Saturday night Satch himself was holding court. 

 We discussed one of his long-time projects, the restaurant's  "Faces of Man" mosaic. 

 

He made it all, including the tile pieces, himself. 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Like Satchels, our many museums are also air-conditioned. 

    We go to the Harn Art Museum on Thursday nights because it has an incredible collection, it often has live music, and, (did I already mention this?) it is air-conditioned.

    They also have "The Camelia Cafe" on the lower level.  We had dinner there. Its a simple soup, sandwich, & salad kind of place

with a view of the sculpture garden outside.

 

    

 

 The museum's current exhibits include an outstanding grouping of Jerry Uelsmann's photography and their latest show, 

"Under the Spell of the Palm Tree", the Rice Collection of Cuban Art.

 

One could spend many Thursday nights there taking it all in.

 One of my favorite pieces is sculpture parked out front, "Everyone Wanted to Fly".

    This is a new kind of hybrid, a 1953 Chrysler New Yorker with a 326 c.i. Spitfire Straight 8 under the hood paired with four GE B-47 turbojets suspended under the wings.

    Unfortunately no one is allowed to fly it or even sit inside.

     Satchel's has its own airplane. Its not a hybrid but at least they let you sit in the cockpit to enjoy dinner. 

     

Neighbors Tina and Ward drove their Big White Guppy camper van to New England to escape the heat.

 While Ward flew off to Taiwan to do one of his architectural performance pieces, "The Islands",

The Islands

 

 

Tina traveled to Vermont to try to talk her friend, Bernie, into running for President again.

Tina meeting Bernie at a Fourth event

 

    

 

 

 

  It amazes me that terrific events come to town that few people know about.  In the old days, when we had real newspapers and people reading them, this would be less likely to happen.

      

       Five days ago a dramatic performance, "Black Like He", was staged at the Phillips Center.  Eight men acted out different vignettes that flowed together incorporating dialog with music,  dance and song. Each part related to the challenges of being a black man in America. 

The cast and crew after the show

 

 

My wife and I both thought, "This is an amazing show. We're so lucky to be among the few who knew about it.  Sponsored by the UF Arts in Medicine program, admission was free. On top of all that, the entire building was air-conditioned!

  In this loony world, where we are bombarded with dorky commercials, it can be hard to learn about the good stuff.

   Bats are good. They fertilize plants, eat insects, and inspire certain super heroes to do great things. But it is hard to hear them.

For moment we forgot it was hot.

    That all changed when our friend, Phil, came to visit Sunday night. He had a bat chirp amplification device. After the sun went down (and the temp dipped below 90) we ventured outside to watch bats take over the Gainesville sky. 

 Gradually, when it was almost dark, we not only saw them but heard their clicks as the flitted madly about.

After a few minutes someone noticed that our yard was not air-conditioned.  "Yikes!" we exclaimed as we scurried back inside to bright lights and artificial cool.

    If you made it this far, thanks.  Quite a slog wasn't it?  If you're in G'ville July 27th, come meet us at Art Night at the Harn. There will be great art, live music, and most important of all, air-conditioning!

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MAYBE PIGS CAN FLY

       It's happening. This airborne oinker thing is taking off.  Since we started planing December's Flying Pig Parade I'm seeing more and more of those winged critters.

       Last Sunday I was at an event that including a

reading of "Maybe", a book by Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Gabriella Barouch. It's about the thoughts of a young girl. There's little pet pig by her side.

      She wonders about everything one can do and everything that one can be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You are the only you that has ever been or ever will be. "

 

 

 

 

"Maybe you will invent something that no one has ever seen before."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your life is yours. 

 

 

 

 

Try as many things as you can try. See as much as you can see.

 

 

 

 

Maybe you will help others to see the beauty in each day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

or speak up for those who
can't speak for themselves.

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

   The book reminds us of all of the magical, unbounded potential we hold inside. 

       

 

And of course, at the end, the little pink pet reaches her potential as she takes to the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

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THE TREES ARE FREAKIN' OUT!

      It's ridiculous how men try to prove their worth by arm wrestling, engaging in war, and even in pissing contests. Any chance I had in the last one ended when my prostate gland started expanding years ago.

     A Miami urologist explained, "It's restricting the flow of your urine and will only get worse." When worse meant getting up to pee four times a night I knew things had to change.  

    

    Last week I underwent  an operation to reduce the size of my prostate. It will allow me to whiz like a normal guy again.

    I'm glad I did. It went well. 

   As silly as it sounds, it's thrilling to be able to hit a tree four-feet away once more.  For a moment it's as if I have found a small part of my lost youth.

      It'll take a while to recover. I can't ride a bike for a month. In the mean time I made a thank-you card for my surgeon.  It reads,

    

SUMMER FUN- PART ONE

     Our camper van was spending too much time in the driveway. Last month we took it north to enjoy friends, family and cool mountain air.  Our first stop was the faux-alpine village of Helen, Georgia.

It was like Micky Mouse in lederhosen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What was even stranger was the red gypsy wagon we rented nearby.

With no campsites available we reserved what seemed to be something more spacious than our Toyota van. We soon learned it was smaller, had torn sheets, and smelled like dirty laundry.  The van suited us just fine that night.

     

 

Camping in North Carolina's Cataloochee Valley is always extraordinary. Since elk were re-introduced a few years ago, it is not uncommon to have these 600-pounders lumbering past the campground.

     

 Stranger than Germanic Mickeyland was the Jeff Mathews Museum in Galax, Va. This is a personal project, a life-long collection of one man and his friends. 

They started with arrowheads and when they had too many, they began turning them into weird "Indian art". 

 

 There might have been 20 cases of these sharpened stones

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clovis Jackson and his award-winning arrowhead mosaic

 

 

"Eclectic" does not go far enough to describe  a museum that displays the tonsillectomy chair where, for years, Dr. J. Glenn Cox scraped those bothersome lymph nodes out of his patient's throats, 

next to,

 

     

 

a display of assembled plastic movie monsters.

   

 

Nearby was what was said to be the city's first electric hair curler machine.

 

 

 

 

 

And not far from that,

 

 

 

a "complete dental office" which took me back to tortured times of my youth. 

 

 

The museum founders took great pride in the killing exotic animals for display.

"One of the world's largest mounted Kodiak bears" the sign said.

 

 

Their forebears took great pride in killing Yankees in an effort to preserve slavery during the conflict known as the Civil War. 

 

Many people donated photos of their ancestors to the musuem's Civil War display

"1861- One Confederate is Equal Of Ten Yankees".    

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While there were over 500,000 enslaved people living in Virginia at

the time of the Civil War (and the black population is three times that now) there is no mention of them in the Jeff Mathews Museum. The closest thing to it are two carvings of Congolese warriors purchased on an African hunting trip.

     Many Virginians have fought in wars since then. One of them, World War II, came to an end when an American B-29 dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima.

     You can see the bombing that won the war in the lower level on the Jeff Mathews Museum.

   

 

 

     Less momentous is the dashing black car that won the city's

soap box derby back in 1952. 

  

 

 

 

 

History was made again 27 years later when Galax's Kylene Barker was crowned Miss America.

 

 

 

 

This corner is devoted to her remarkable achievement.

 

I met her dad once, the only person who has ever told me, "Y'know, my daughter was Miss America".

I was impressed and being single at the time, asked if she was too.

Dad let me know she was married to some fella she'd met in Nassau. 

    A little bragging goes a long way in Galax, Va.  The legend of Talmadge Jones may go on forever just because he donated his little green wagon to the Jeff Mathews Museum.

 

           You can visit this marvelous collection Wednesdays through Saturdays, 11 and 4 p.m. Admission is free and donations, happily accepted.

         After visiting Jeff's museum we headed home with visions of Miss America, painful tonsillectomies, and Johnny Reb ("ten times tougher than any Yankee") dancing in our heads..

Thankfully, they did not dance long,  I started thinking of creating my own museum.  Would you come to it, "Glenn's Incredible Driftwood Collection"?

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