Sunset, Monday, 19 July 2010

William Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Hi, Sandy!

Sunset, Sunday, 17 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

If someone you were very fond of was celebrating their 60th birthday, you too might dispense with caution and embarrassment, dust off Garageband, grab the Taylor 410 (for sale, if anyone’s interested), and look up the chords to “You’re Sixteen,” which was #8 when Johnny Burnette did it in 1960, and #1 when Ringo Starr covered it in 1974, apparently with help from Paul McCartney (on the kazoo?) and Harry Nilsson. Anyway, the chords, the changes, were a lot more interesting than I expected, no offense intended to those performers.

Then you might send that person a little song, including:

You stepped out of a dream
Off of the farm
Now you’re our Sandy divine
You’re sixty
So beautiful
And so fine

She really did come right from the farm.

You also might try to make sure that ‘her’ sunset, even though it’s been raining all day, didn’t look like a complete washout.

Sunset, Thanksgiving, 26 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

At sunset a few drops of rain began falling on my brother Steve’s face as he napped in the hammock, in two blankets.

Inside, my sister Emily, here from Indiana, told everyone about 350.org.

We called our brother Mike, camping with his family and his father-in-law in Seminole Canyon, in Texas, and left him a raucous Thanksgiving voicemail.

Laura called her sister Mary Scott, who was in Lynchburg, Virginia, with the rest of their family.

My niece Jody missed her fiance, Jason.

My niece Ashley and her husband, Erik, were texting with their friend Dan, anchor on a local newscast, while he was trying to cope with a program cut ever shorter by the Cowboys-Raiders game.

Sandy, my sister-in-law, had just come through a grueling several weeks of medical tests, results of which she and Steve got just yesterday. Thanksgiving was thanksgiving. Sandy did an impersonation of the turkey that gets saved by the White House.

Sunset, Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

It was a perfect summer day, then storms chilled everything down. The sky behind me, where the storms went, was half Creamsicle orange, half some deranged hydrangea blue – and if that sounds like a queasy mixed metaphor, it should. I might have taken a shot at it except not one but two cats were sleeping on (and wrinkling) the rolled-up cut linen I could have used for a second painting.

The most important thing I could possibly ever say about July 1st – with all respect to the great and (around these united states) highly underrated nation of Canada – is that it’s the wedding anniversary of Steve & Sandy Van Doren – 37 years today. Congratulations to the best people in the world, or at least my world.

I had some concern that people might take the following the wrong way and assume that the porcine reference could somehow be about them. I’ve taken an informal but devastatingly accurate poll ... and determined that my readers know better than that.

So, let’s ...

PLAY BALL!

I came to the ballpark
And discovered I was pitching
In a lightweight purple uniform
Before stands of black obsidian
I threw pearls across the plate
And every time the swine struck out
The million-dollar Mitsubishi scoreboard
Lit up with a picture of a roast pig with an apple in its mouth.