There are many, many more old family photos (my wife's family, not mine) now posted over at my Old Photos Flickr account. It was a different time, facial-hair-wise.

Sometimes you find amazing and inexplicable things on Google Street View. This scene is from Albany, just above Washington Park.

There's a story here somewhere.

Eloquence in the face of stupidity, rage and hate touches me more than almost anything else. So please take a moment to read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s 1973 letter to the chairman of the school board in Drake, North Dakota, who felt that burning books was somehow what our children should aspire to. It's not surprising to me, in that terrible, volatile time of war, racial tensions, and economic distress, that some would decide that burning books was the way to shape the world in their own image. But it's endlessly distressing to me that, nearly 40 years later, hardly anything is different.

Here's an excerpt from what Vonnegut wrote to that school board chairman:

"After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, 'Yes, yes - but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.' This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

"I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can't stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s books meant more to me as an adolescent than any other author. In his later years, he seemed to me to be a cranky old man, but now I'm starting to see his point. In any event, read his entire and entirely beautiful letter over here, at Letters of Note.

I want my bridges not to collapse. Really, I do. Living in Rensselaer County and needing to find a way across the Hudson every day, I appreciate every dollar of maintenance that goes into the second Dunn Memorial (though sometimes I wish it were still a low-rise lift bridge) and the Patroon Island Bridge. I want them to stay up, and I'm aware that's been a challenge. But working on both of them in the same year? Urgggh. All that traffic has to go somewhere -- can't go south, we're out of bridges until Hudson (and out of free bridges until forever). North really doesn't work, have to go all the way up to the Troy-Menands bridge for another opportunity to cross. (And the next bridge up, the Congress Street bridge, will also be under renovations this year.) I can still bike across the Dunn (despite massive tearing up of Broadway in Rensselaer), but if anyone wants to come with me, we may need to figure out how to run a kayak ferry across to the ballet school.

Add to this that the main road by our house, the only road that easily lets us go in the other direction away from the bridge, the only road that would connect us to Troy and stay on this side of the river, is about to close for construction, and I'm feeling a little bit hemmed in. Better start reading those tide charts carefully.

For some reason I have tripped upon a lot of wedding-related writing in the past few days, and it just amazes me how insane people let it make them. I've long said that if people put anywhere near the amount of effort into the marriage that they put into the wedding, there'd be far fewer divorces.

I was looking for something else and ran across this photo from our wedding. It was 1983. We were married in our apartment on a cold November afternoon by a judge we didn't know. A few friends and family came. She made that dress. We're so young, and she's so beautiful, that it breaks my heart. Of course, we had no idea what we were getting into. No one does. It's been as easy as breathing, except for the parts that were awful and hard and painful. But I liked the hard parts, too, because we shared them, came through them, and now there's just nothing we can't get through.

A short ceremony in our apartment followed by a nice dinner in a restaurant we liked, a delightful evening out with friends and family. Was it a dream wedding? It's the marriage that counts.

This started out as a long, dreary post about why I live where I live, but I thought I'd cut the dreary. The "Non-Urban" part of My Non-Urban Life is that I'm in an early suburb, set just across the river and up a hill from the filth and noise of the city, advertised as a place for healthful living just minutes away by trolley. We're on little village lots, close to our neighbors (in good and bad ways), on streets that should have had sidewalks but don't. I live a block from a lovely little lake that has been the center of neighborhood activity since a neighborhood was installed on historic old farmland more than 85 years ago. The schools are good, the politics petty, and diversity almost non-existent. So sometimes I wish I lived in a place where I could tuck down the street for a morning coffee or an evening decaf or grab some groceries without getting in a car (although honestly, there are limited places in the city where that's true). Since the number one thing I hate about my current location, perhaps the only thing, is one of my current neighbors, going back into a city setting and getting even closer (physically) to my neighbors seems unappealing.

But there are some other parts of the urban fabric I miss. Sidewalks, for instance. Stoops. Looking at the details on the brownstones. Somehow taking a walk through our neighborhood and looking at one sloppy vinyl siding job after another isn't the same as tripping down Second Street in Troy and looking at the ornate doors and window casings. I miss wondering what goes on in the secluded back patios, what little gems of gardens are hidden there. And I miss being able to walk to work, as I could and did for several years in Syracuse and Albany. While it's hard to figure out where jobs are going to take you, I've worked a substantial number of my years in downtown Albany, and my wife now works in downtown Troy, and it would be nice for one or the other to be able to roll out the door and down the street for a brisk 20-minute walk, rather than having to contend with traffic and bus schedules and the problems of crossing the bridge by bike.

So as we've just refinanced and are looking at finally making this into the house we wanted it to be, it's also tempting to just re-assess and see if there isn't a better location. I find downtown Troy absolutely charming and have enjoyed the residents I've met, but wonder if it could fit my lifestyle. Right now it doesn't seem that way -- I don't see city houses with off-street parking, room for bikes and boats, and a decent separation from neighbors at a price I can pay. Or where I do, they're essentially in neighborhoods just like mine, not adding a lot of walkability or diversity; they're just suburban houses in a city.

So I think we're staying put in our little slice of non-urbia.

My great grandfather's sheetrock knife.