I wasn’t in the park today until 3pm; I was dealing with the bad news about my car.

“With 275 thousand miles on it,” the man from the auto repair shop told me, “it really isn’t worth repairing. It has no compression; the timing chain must have completely slipped, and the oil is burnt. It’s as if there was a fire in the oil pan. You would have to replace the entire engine.”

It was yesterday that I received a call from Marcus that he was stranded by the side of highway 40, between Lindbergh and McKnight road. When I got there a Ladue policeman was keeping a watch over him, a very good thing considering the narrowness of the s

This weekend has been quite a respite from the bitter cold we have been enduring this winter, and today was bright and beautiful from beginning to end. I saw the beginning as I was walking my dog this morning, and it was a doozy. The sun burst over the eastern horizon at least twice its normal size, an intense orange orb, engulfing the world with fire. It made me wish I were in Forest Park.

It was Guardian Goose who raised the alarm that spooked the Great Blue Heron and caused the mallards to leave their perches on the ice and float into the free water. He started clucking before Rigby and I were within 150 yards of the edge of Deer Lake, and continued making his odd noise as we approached. The morning gloom was just beginning to lift and Rigby had to sniff every little clump of everything we encountered, so I let him drag me off from that spot and we headed east.

Today was the first clear day we have had in quite some time. The first day of warmer temperatures expected through the weekend. It was also the first day of visits by my wife to see doctors about her arm. What’s wrong with her arm? Well, at daybreak she stepped onto some black ice while walking the dog, slipped and fell onto her left hand, twisting her left wrist into a rather unnatural position

We got to sleep late this morning, thanks to my teens’ schools calling a late start on account of last night’s snow. Yesterday Rebecca wanted to stay home and I had to explain how life doesn’t stop just because we think it’s too cold, or too wet, or too windy. Today it was much warmer than yesterday; it was 5ºF when we woke up and 10ºF by the time I finished walking in Forest Park!

I hit the ground running this morning, after a half night’s sleep in my job as Monday overnight staff at a homeless shelter, racing to open the doors at Studio 858 for a personal photo lesson. Peggy, a retired opera singer was my pupil, and understanding Adobe Lightroom was the lesson. We had a great time talking about music, in-between saying poetic things in French and swearing in German.

The Central Fields were my stomping grounds today. Actually, the edge of the Central Fields were my stomping grounds today as there was a “Keep Off the Grass” sign on the eastern edge. It was a nice sign, and very polite. Something to the effect of “Dear Forest Park visitor, we’ve just put down new grass and it is hard to get it to grow and we’d hate to have to break your legs, so how ‘bout stayin’ off, eh?”

Mein hut er hat drei ecken was a song we sang in German class, even though my hat had no corners at all. Forest Park has, more or less, 4 corners, and today I haunted the southeast corner of the park. It is a corner with connections, history and even controversy. It contains an underground television studio, a coyote hideout, a tunnel under US Route 40, two children's

This morning, while cruising through the park in my little blue pick-up truck and thinking about the classes I had to teach today and how many entries we would get for the 4th Annual Photography Club Photo Contest, I chanced upon a race. A thirteen mile race, as it turned out, with runners of almost every description. There were tall runners, short runners, fat runners, skinny runners,

I was hoping for a sunset today, but like so many events in life, the end did not live up to the beginning. The Sun rose to clear skies in the east, the day was bright and sunny (though cold) until early afternoon, but by the time I had finished my work and headed outside, clouds had moved in from the west and the sun had gotten hazy. There were still some breaks in t

You knew it had to happen; sooner or later, this Forest Park wandering photographer was going to wind up in the zoo and hangin’ with the lions, tigers and bears (oh, my)! Actually, that day has not yet come, since, even though I was in the Zoo, the closest

It was indeed a brilliant idea! I could achieve an entirely different perspective on Forest Park by mounting my camera with a wide angle lens on top of a painter’s pole. So I went to the hardware store and bought a bright yellow fiberglass extension pole and a package of three quick release pegs to mount my camera connector. Then I took an umbrella adaptor

I may be the only person you know who has actually walked the perimeter of Forest Park. It has an odd shape, sorta like the state of Massachusetts; mostly rectangular with an extension on the south east corner. That extension now hosts the Kingshighway

The sun was shining when I got up this morning and the first thought I had (well, the first cheerful thought, anyway) was “This is a great time to go to Forest Park!” So that is what I did. I take it you are not surprised by this revelation. I talked my wife into going with me, as she had the day off, and we tramped through yesterday unexpected snowfall, making footprints in

It wasn’t a very long sojourn in the park today. I wasn’t feeling up to par and the temperature was a bit on the low side. In fact, it took me about an hour indoors in front of a fire to get my toes back to feeling normal after this walk. But my son-in-law gave me some warmer boots tonight, so perhaps tomorrow won’t be quite so chilling.

Tell me I’m not slipping back into the ’70’s! But here he is, John Denver, from somewhere in my distant past singing; 

It's cold and it's getting colder. It's gray and white and winter all around.

And oh, I must be getting older, all this snow is trying to get me down.

So the weatherman lied to us again, at least about the snow, but it is getting down into the temperatures that I consider to be “cold”, just as he said it would.

Yes, it is a challenge finding time to go exploring in Forest Park every day, particularly when it is wet and cold. Today was not as cold nor as wet as it is predicted to be this weekend, but it was still both, conditions of which I am not very fond. The challenge, however, is the constant creation of art, discovery of the new hidden in the familiar, and the practice of the seeing.

Out on the edge of Picnic Island, near the Grand Basin I stood and listened to the hushed rumble of the fountains behind the clucks, cheeps and twitters of the winged creatures of the park. A jet was passing somewhere nearby and in the distance I could make out sounds of the city. The morning’s fog was enough to dull my photos, but not quite

It seems appropriate, my excursion into the Art Museum today. And enjoyable! And maybe even prescient, as my wife just shoved a book under my nose entitled “Art Before Breakfast - A Zillion Ways to Be More Creative No Matter How Busy You are”, by Danny Gregory. This is the third time she has checked it out of the library, she informed me, so I figure I have to read it.

And it starts like this: