matching tracksuits

Downtown Rock Hill, Part 2

Thursday 02 August 2012

Is downtown Rock Hill is the story of America? One would certainly hope not, but in some ways, it seems to have all the elements in parallel. Within a couple of blocks we have signs of incredible affluence

and poverty-driven decay.

What's the difference between these two homes? What's the difference between the owners of these homes? Over the last few years, my explanations have shifted from the left to the center-right of the political spectrum. The answer seems hinted in other parts of town.

Still only a few blocks away, Nana points out yet another building with personal significance: the remains of Rock Hill Printing & Finishing. "This was where I was working when I met Papa," she explains to us. She shows us where she used to enter, pointing out roughly where her desk was.

One wonders if there are any plans to renovate this particular building as others in the area. Just up the road, an old factory has been turned into an apartment complex. One could likely turn this shell into high-ceiling lofts or something similar. But is the demand there? I think back to the abandoned post office just a few blocks away, figuring it's unlikely that this gigantic building will ever become of anything more than the subject of a blog post.

Just behind it lies the heart of the factory, once impressive, but now merely tragic. According to one source,

The building of the Rock Hill Printing and Finishing Plant in 1929 moved M. Lowenstein halfway along the way to becoming a totally integrated producer of textiles. The Rock Hill plant bleached, dyed, printed and finished cloth purchased from a variety of sources, primarily in the South. The rapid expansion of Lowenstein through the acquisition of textile mills produced the raw material for the plant and resulted in its own expansion. By the early 1960s, it grew from a plant with 200,000 square feet to one with more than 2 million square feet, which bleached, dyed, and finished both cotton and synthetic fabrics. New processes such as Sanforizing and the use of Scotchgard TM finishing permitted it to create permanent press cloth during the 1970s. Acquired by Springs Industries in 1986, the plant included 23 roller print machines and 7 screen print machines. (textilehistory.org)

Looking at an aerial view of the factory in its heyday, it's clear the impact its closure had on the economics of Rock Hill. Now, only inspiration remains.

This is the story of South Carolina, a story that hopefully America as a whole will not echo. But I wonder. South Carolina used to be a textile center. My family's fate was tied into that of the mills. My mother worked in a mill; my grandmother worked in a mill; countless aunts worked in mills. My father did electrical work in mills; my grandfather likely did masonry work for a mill or two. Every South Carolinian has mill work somewhere in her family history.

The cemetery just a block or so away is surely filled with those who worked the roller print machines and the bleaching machines, with those who did the screen printing and counted the cost of everything.

Rock Hill is only one of many textile cities in South Carolina that has suffered this fate. It's only one of thousands of cities in America that must be harboring doubts that its best days lie in the future.

Sweet and Sour

Wednesday 01 August 2012

Summer is sweet and sour. It is vines of filled with tomatoes turning a gentle orange before shifting to deep, sweet red. We pick them and smell the perfume that lingers on our hands. Romas provide consistency; Better Boys provide juice.

Then there's the sour: weeds. They grow in the now-composted mulch that's supposed to be keeping them out.

But there's the sweetest of all: a boy who will wait patiently while mom tugs at the weeds.

The Story of Three Tempi

Tuesday 31 July 2012

A little over two years ago, K and I invested in a digital piano with our tax return windfall. The Girl was taking an increasing interest in music, and guitar is not an ideal instrument for youthful, musical experimentation and discovery: you really have to coordinate both hands at once to get anything vaguely meaningful unless you’re in an open tuning with a slide. Having taken piano lessons for several years in my youth, I was also eager to rediscover the piano.

Since then, I’ve combed my old piano books for familiar and new. One of the pieces I’ve fallen in love with and begun working on is Mozart’s “Fantasia No. 3 in D minor”, K. 397. Naturally, I turned to YouTube and found three radically different interpretations.

You can tell a lot just by looking at the times of the video: Jorg Demus’s version clocks in at 4:12; Gould’s lasts an excruciating 8:22; Arrau’s, a reasonable 6:07. Just from looking at the times, you see that Demus is playing twice as fast as Gould, who in turn is taking a tempo thirty percent slower than what seems reasonable.

Jorg Demus plays it like he’s taken a whole bottle of speed. At this speed, the second part of the piece, which transposes into D major, sounds almost like a tape played at double-speed. This portion is marked allegretto, which Demus seems to think is synonymous with presto. It’s most painful at the 3:30 mark. In fact, as I listen, it sounds like it must be artificially accelerated.

Gould, on the other hand, plays it like he’s taken a bottle of valium. Slow, plodding, almost childishly mocking, with typical Gould liberties: erratic tempo, unnecessarily arpeggiated chords.

And of course, there’s that ever-annoying Gould humming in the background. I can put up with it on his second recording of Goldberg Variations, but perhaps that’s only out of habit.

Only Arrau plays it as it seems it should be played. The tempi aren’t exaggerated — allegretto sounds like AllegrettoÂ — and there’s enough of a lyrical touch to infuse an artist’s ever-important “interpretation” (often “mutilation”) without compromising the period and making it sound like a Romantic wannabe. Arrau has such a perfect touch that I’d have been partial to his interpretation from the start.

Yes, this is a filler post…

Downtown Rock Hill, Part 1

Monday 30 July 2012

Visits to Rock Hill are visits to family. Only rarely is anything else involved. But every now and then, we go beyond the normal visit schedule. This week, we went downtown to visit the children's museum. After the visit and a quick lunch, we went for a quick walk.

Like many old, small downtown areas, Rock Hill's small main street is both heartening and depressing.

On the heartening side, it's good to see so many beautiful, historic buildings renovated and put to new use. A Baptist church is now a community center.

Yet the renaissance is only partial, as it often is. Across the street from the restored church is an abandoned post office that stands empty. What are the possibilities? Certainly endless, but the economy places its own limitations, I suppose.

Just down the street, more evidence of a halting recovering for the downtown area.

Yet perhaps things are not as they seem. A quick search reveals that Penny Young still runs a studio by the name Photographic Designs. Perhaps she outgrew the space?

Still, one has to admire the effort and the little touches, like the music in the trees, initially confusing as one wanders about,

and the little cafes with outside tables that would be more inviting if it weren't for the heat of a South Carolina summer.

As we walked, though, we weren't as interested in what is happening in 2012; we were more interested in what was happening in the early 1950's when Papa was a kid.

"Here's where we had our high school Bucket of Lard sermon," he explained, with typical sarcasm, pointing to a church just meters away from the renovated church/community center. Who knew there were so many churches in downtown Rock Hill?

Another church, just down the street, was the sight of a run-in with the police. "We were roaring down the street on our skates -- and these were those skates you strapped onto the bottom of your shoes and tighten with the key you kept hung round your neck -- and the officer comes running out to us, furious. 'Don't you boys know there's a funeral going on in there?'" One can only imagine the noise several boys on metal-wheeled skates.

Still, it wasn't all amusing stories. Some were touching.

At the coveted location of the prestigious Dee & Lee Unique Hair Design, there was once a jewelry store. The large display windows are now virtually empty, though one can imagine them filled with bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and rings of gold and silver, all glittering enticingly.

The significance is likely obvious: "This is where I bought Nana's engagement ring," he explained as we passed by. It was a photo op one couldn't pass up: a happy couple standing in front of a hair salon -- a picture that contains a secret history.

Children’s Museum

Sunday 29 July 2012

Our trips to Rock Hill are almost always the same: we go to visit family. It's a rhythm, as predictable as the beat of a Sousa march. That's not meant to be a complaint: there's comfort in ritual.

Yet sometimes, it's good to change the beat a little. K, with her adventuring spirit, is always a catalyst for those changes.

"Did you know there's a children's museum in Rock Hill?" she asked earlier this week. "Maybe we could go on Sunday, after we meet with family." I did not know, but after a lazy morning, we head out for Main Street in downtown Rock Hill.

The museum is small -- minuscule, in fact, compared to the Children's Museum of the Upstate here in Greenville, which is three stories of adventure. Yet L doesn't complain. She takes off exploring immediately.

Papa doesn't complain either. He gets the Boy, who at eleven weeks looks and feels (he weighs over sixteen pounds already and is already wearing clothes for babies six to nine months old) much older than he is.

The Girl, though, has no time to sit for pictures with Papa, or anyone else for that matter. There is a pulley systems to explore.

And a scale with a barrel of bean bags beside it.

"Which do you think weighs more? A round one or a square one?" I ask. We perform an impromptu experiment to determine that square ones weigh a touch more.

But what happens if we put them all in? Every last bean bag?

And what happens if we put everything in sight into the sale?

Soon, she's creating magnet art with K, exploring the dress up room (located inside a vault -- the building used to house a bank), and returning to her favorite stations.

In the end, she finds perfection: a small kitchen with two buckets of bean bags. She spreads them all over the floor, then takes the broom and sweeps them into piles before collecting them in small wooden buckets she later dumps into the barrels.

"Daddy, I'm Cinderella," she begins, and I know the rest: "And you're the evil step-mother." I tell her how awfully she's cleaning, then kiss her and remind her, "We're just playing, remember? I don't really think you're doing an awful job."

"Oh, I know."

Meet the Boy

Saturday 28 July 2012

"Everyone wants to meet the Boy," Nana explained a few weeks ago, and so we take a trip to Rock Hill to see the aunts, uncles, and cousins.

A trip to Rock Hill means a trip to one of the best hosts we know -- my aunt. She'll suggest a get together, say she wants to cook as little as possible, then bring out half a dozen different dishes. We arrive early to help out a bit. I cut some squash; K makes herself busy with melons; and soon, we have too many cooks in the kitchen.

When the rest of the family arrives and adds their food, we we end up with a bar covered with salads alone. "If anyone leaves hungry," Nana often laughs, "It's his own fault."

Yet tasty as it is, the food is not the reason for the visit. Family, family, family -- and this is only the smallest portion of the smallest percent of our huge family. Had all the cousins and their children come, we would have easily had forty or fifty people in the house.

Yet enough cousins came to make a party for the kids as well.

I watch the kids -- who can even count them all? -- playing and screaming, and I think, "This must be what it's like to be the Brady Bunch."

Not a bad thought, indeed.

This was written on the 28th but not uploaded due to a lack of internet access. Plus, I have to keep my once-a-day record up for July, hence the cheating back-dating.

From Dawn to Dusk

Friday 27 July 2012

Breakfast should have been a hint of the day to come. While at Aldi yesterday, we found a real deal on small fillets, so we had steak (one fillet shared between the two of us) and eggs for breakfast.

The Girl entertained the Boy while we finished up breakfast, and I joked, “This is the kind of breakfast that sticks with you until dinner.”

Little did we know how busy we would be

Applying another coat of Thompson’s on the deck (it didn’t make sense to leave a touch in one can) while K took care of the kids and did laundry;
Mowing in 95 degree pure sun as K took care of the kids and cooked barszcz;
Cleaning the house while K took care of the kids and did more laundry (The Boy goes through so much laundry that it’s a miracle there’s still water left in the county);
Taking the Girl for a promised swim as K took care of the Boy;

It looks like such a short, innocuous list, but between steps three and four, K and I fell asleep while the Girl watched an episode ofÂ Martha Speaks and the Boy took a post-meal snooze.

And nature provided the first test of four mornings’ of waterproofing

You’d think

Thursday 26 July 2012

that after spending the last three mornings/early afternoons spreading a liberal coat of water sealant on our deck that I could get by with a post-wash, pre-treatment picture from 2008, when I last did such a thorough job.

After all, I’m just trying to post this thing so I can get back to my cigar and YouTube snooker…

Portraits

Wednesday 25 July 2012

K heads upstairs with the Boy and the camera. "We haven't done any portraits in a while," she says, "and the light is good in the bedroom.

With a two-month-old, frequent portraits reveal the cumulative daily changes that seem to slip by almost unnoticed.

Like toenails that need trimming.

Princess Camp

Tuesday 24 July 2012

Princess ballet camp every Tuesday. Can you imagine anything any better?

The final session today ended with a performance, which included a bit of insight into how the little ballerinas get ready -- the stretching, the prep.

Cleaning

Monday 23 July 2012

It's a time of recycling. All the infant toys that have sat in storage for literally years are now out, dumped in the bathroom sink for a good scrubbing before handing them off to the Boy.

The Girl's constant refrain -- "Can I help?" -- receives an enthusiastic "Yes."

The New

Sunday 22 July 2012

With temperatures what they are, the new will have to wait. Exploring this or that place with a sweaty infant does not in the least sound entertaining. For anyone.

So a third afternoon out of four at the pool seems the only logical response.

Point of View

Saturday 21 July 2012

The Boy likes his bassinet. He giggles to his bears, squeals when they start swinging, and fusses when they calm down. His cow can hold undivided attention for whole, long stretches. The newest addition — the plastic chain — is of little interest now, but perhaps that will change when his still-shaky emerging hand-eye coordination improves. It doesÂ beg to be grasped at.

Sometimes, something will catch his eye — something outside the bassinet — and he’ll look, seemingly unblinkingly, for several minutes. Other times, he’ll simply lie quietly, looking up at his bears.

Still, it must be something like a prison. Walls on the sides, a covering, and a restricted coordinated movement hamper his ability to look at what he wishes, to explore, to see anything more than bears and faces.

Sources of Joy

Friday 20 July 2012

Having someone play with you and your dolls is a great source of joy. “Pretend she’s…” begins most every sentence — and this time, the playmate will actually play along with the request.

Being surrounded by dogs thrilled to be with you and eager to show you is an endless source of joy. It lasts as long as the dogs’ energy, hence it is truly seems infinite.