(The Blonde took this shot yesterday at a restaurant called “the Cove” at Lake Anna. I am headed there now).
OK- time to take a deep breath. We got the boys back from their cruise, celebrated the heroes of the Battle of Midway on the anniversary of the first day of that fight, and am having a
hard time dealing with the fact that Muhammed Ali is gone. I saw him at the airport in Louisville years ago, and shouted out “Well done, Champ!” or something inane.
I know that is how it works- you hear the obits and wonder at the youth of some of them, and presently someone is reading yours.
I am also pointedly stayed out of the lunacy out there on the campaign trail.firmly convinced we could find a better candidate for either party with a random scan of the first couple pages of the Boston white pages. But never mind. Then, a couple thousand images arrived from the nice people at Scan Café, an enterprise that specializes in transferring old media like slides and negatives into digital products that can be viewed on screen or shipped around.
The challenge had been that all of them showed up in a box placed in the backseat of the Police Cruiser when my son had it on his last visit. I didn’t know what it meant, and there is nothing quite as daunting as a bunch of negatives for which there is no clue as to the content. I tried to feed one through the little scanner I bought when I inherited Mom and Dad’s color slides, but it was too hard.
Scan Café was the answer then, and despite the daunting cost, I bit the bullet, shipped the box off to California, and forgot about it. I pity the poor worker who had to actually scan them all- they showed up with the originals in a tidy package. Which is another huge challenge, since my iMac doesn’t have a CD drive and I need to get the pictures some place I can edit them.
Which is another all-weekend chore I am not going to get to for a while. It is important to stay busy in semi-retirement, right? But I did look briefly at the contents of the three CDs that came back with the negatives. All the great events of twenty years I thought I would never see again, what was lost was now found. It is a lot to process.
And that is not all that was missing that is back, and why I am not gong to deal with it today: I got a picture from The Big blonde that absolutely electrified me. She has found the Amen Corner of the Willow Bar, and I am headed there this afternoon after my swim.
The place where the bar wound up used to be called something else. I met the owner at the break-down event after the auction of the Willow’ contents was complete, and the men with the crow-bars attacked the bar at which we had been seated for the better part of a decade. It was more than a little surreal, but an attractive blonde woman was surveying the ongoing demolition with a certain proprietary air.
I had nothing to lose, and was holding one of the Willow champagne buckets in one hand and the chrome stand in the other and asked her if she was the new owner. She stuck out a graceful hand and said her name was Julie- I think- and she was going to install it in a place she owned down at Lake Anna called the “No Wake Zone.”
“Wow,” I said. “My country place is not far from there. I will be down!” Then I asked her when it was going to be open, and she replied that it would be March of this year. You can bet we were watching like hawks to see when they opened, but nothing. I guess I kind of accepted that the Amen Corner was lost to some warehouse or storage unit and I would never see the corner where Old Jim used to preside every week-day, four to seven.
So, you could have blown me over with a feather when I got the email saying that not only was the Willow Bar found, but it was open for business! It is reportedly in a place that just changed management down at the lake called The Cove.
I was so excited that I called the Blonde and arranged to meet her and Jack down there this afternoon, and crash at the farm afterward. Accordingly, I need to get my act together and get on down the road.
I intend to have a couple drinks at my usual place at the Amen Corner.
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com