Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| A Small Sample of the Coins Surveyed in the Article Referred to Below. Source of image: See the Wayne-Shelby-Survey Link Below. |
In my previous post, I posted a great article about how some detectorists found what appeared to be an old post hole bank. I didn't take time to comment on the article a lot, but there were a lot of good tips in that article.
For one thing, maybe you noticed that the finds were made in steps over a number of hunts. First they found shallow coins in a relatively small area on multiple hunts. At that point, there was little to suggest a cache.
Many times I've talked about returning to a site that provides promise and detecting it over and over. I even described what I call an Intensive Multiple Step Search procedure (The Treasure Beaches Report Direct From Florida's Treasure Coast.: 7/22/14 Report - Tropical Depression Two Moving West & How To Conduct An Intensive Step Search). That is very close to what the detectorists in that article although not exactly. For example, they didn't use different types of detectors on different outings. That is something that is often advisable.
Maybe you noticed that the detectorists didn't discover the cache until after a number of hunts. The scattered near surface coins were first.
Then when they discovered the first coins of the cache, there were still multiple hunts and layers. After the first group they went back and found there were more coins deeper. And then they dug the hole wider and deeper until they were down about six feet. There were definitely stages the discovery.
I generally don't post articles to simply show that somebody found something. There are usually a number of tips of lessons. In this case, the detectorists used the lack of bricks, iron, and other items, and wondered why so many coins were scattered out in the middle of an open farm field where there was no evidence of a building or structures.
When you read of finds, see what other lessons you can find in the article. In this case, the article presented some very interested questions and showed the line of thought used in attempting to answer those questions.
But there is even more. The detectorists kept detailed records and analyzed coins found at a variety of sites in New Jersey. That included 90 different sites and 1,079 coins divided by type, date, country of origin and/or ruler. There were also 185 coins that were so deteriorated from their years in the ground that specific attribution was impossible.
Below is just one little excerpt from the many pages of the article.
Of the many coins in the survey, 117 were Spanish American, and the vast majority of them being from the Mexico mint. They were almost 1/2, 1, and 2 reales with each denomination being represented by a similar number.
Take a look. I'm sure you'll find it interesting. It is nice to see metal detector finds recorded and analyzed as a valuable source of archaeological and numismatic data.
Coincidentally, the predominant denomination and mint of the Spanish coinage appearing in this survey is coincidentally very much like what I've seen from some of our 1715 Fleet beaches - mostly low denomination and Mexico minted coins.
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| Source: nhc.noaa.gov. |
As you can see there are three areas of development. The northern most is going away from the U.S., but the southern areas show some promise of additional development. However, the ECMWF model at this points suggests that whatever develops there will turn north and also stay far away from the U.S.
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| Image Showing Projected position of cyclone on Aug. 18 as Derived from the ECMWF Model. Source: Windyty.com. |
Still, the Treasure Coast is expected to see a very small surf for the next week.
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| Surf Chart from SurfGuru.com. |
That is really a flat surf. I don't think I've seen such a flat chart before.
There will also be a negative afternoon low tide, so shallow water hunting should be very easy.
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- Negativity Bias: The brain registers and dwells on negative stimuli much faster than positive ones.
- Neuroplasticity: Habitual negative thinking physically carves out pathways in your brain over time.
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Just a few days ago, I posted an article from the Colonial Newsletter. Last night I found that they are making changes. The Colonial Newsletter ceased publication. The new journal will be the Journal of Early American Numismatics, which is not free like the Colonial Newsletter was so unless you are willing to pay for a subscription or can find it through a student or library subscription, you just lost a good resource. Hopefully the old newsletter issues will remain available online for a while. If there is anything I think should be free, it is access to ideas and knowledge.
The academics that always complain about treasure hunters being in it only for the profit, won't do a thing for the public without making sure to make money from it. If they aren't getting a good salary for their leisurely efforts, it takes a grant to get them to move.
Here is a link to the article about the Newsletter's passing.
‘The Colonial Newsletter’ ceasing publication, to be reborn as new journal
Here is a list of articles in the now deceased Colonial Newsletter. You might want to access any articles of interest before they all disappear.
C4N-Index-Author-Winter-2025.pdf
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Isn't it odd that homesteads I and II on the Skinwalker Ranch TV show stand in dangerous disrepair with broken windows etc. I'd think they'd want to have the doors and windows closed so that access by animals or humans would be more controlled for scientific if not maintaining greater security and control for investigations. Also, for safety considerations. Broken windows or uncovered nails aren't good. But since it is a show, maybe they simply want to maintain the haunted house look. When they have the producer or whoever it is from the Oak Island show, it makes me wonder about the credibility of the show. As it is, I don't care a great deal about of it is truthfulness of the show since the methodologies and experiments are interesting, but I'd think they'd want to maintain an image of good credibility. It brings up all kinds of questions and even though it certainly isn't my view, the show sometimes seems to suggest Elon's idea of reality being a simulation, but it looks like they're going more towards aliens and ufo types of things.
I'm wondering why when the homestead was giving off so much heat, the trees were also showing as very hot, but that seemingly wasn't discussed by the team, then I saw a brief view where it looked like the TV lights were blasting trees.
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It must have been 1973, give or take a year, when I sat in an office on the 27th floor of the Tower of Leaning when my dissertation advisor told me I was "perspicacious" and asked if I knew what that meant. I remember that well, probably because I rarely heard anything so positive about myself because my parent's theory of child rearing was that I'd get a big head if they told me I did anything well. I don't know how or if, that actually affected my personality development in any way at all, but for whatever reason, I turned out to be stubbornly independent and very introverted. Maybe I shouldn't, but I like that. And I do think I'm perspicacious, but maybe everybody thinks of themselves that way. I suppose they do.
A half century sounds like a lot of time, but it doesn't really seem that long ago. I'm fond of my memories and wouldn't want to lose them.
The Cathedral of Learning was just across a parking lot from Forbes Field when the Pirates beat the Yankees in the World Series in 1960. Forbes Field was torn down in 1970. I have an old film strip showing my grandma making her way down to the dugout with her box camera to take some pictures of the players. A security guard was starting to walk over her way. She was the extrovert of the family and liked to keep things lively.
I've put years of posts documenting a part of my life on the internet. On occasion I told about parts of my personal life in this blog but over the years I've made many other posts that revealed and documented my thinking and experiences. I posted a lot of photos over the years and told personal stories. Google, AOL and others have vacuumed up a lot of life details.
I like remembering my past and this morning and started to wonder if with AI and all the data that is scanned and encoded could in the future provide AI personal memory assistance. Just to do a little test just to see how it might work, I asked something AI something I knew I had shared in this blog. I asked AI what did the TreasureGuide say were the two most important or beneficial things he ever learned in college. I know I told exactly that in at least one of my posts and wanted to see if AI would pick it up. One of those specific things I mentioned was Operationism. AI didn't catch that. I got some more insight to how AI works. It generalizes a lot, and I've noticed before that it is often wrong.
The answer AI gave me sounded good in a general sense. The story sounded good, kinda like what you'd expect from an ingratiating con man, but one major part of the answer was completely wrong. Maybe AI mistook what others were quoted as saying in my blog for something I said.
At this time my conclusion is that I wouldn't trust AI at this time as a personal memory supplement, but I can imagine that sometime in the future that something like it might be used to help people with memory loss. That, of course, would require the experiences or memories to be recorded or somehow encoded. In my case, I've said a lot online. There are many others that have documented a lot of their lives online and others that easily could. Every teenager has a vast documented digital presence.
Cosidering the massive amount of online documentation that is already online, future developments should make it possible code and store memories much more efficiently. It seems to me that a digital form of memory loss assistance is not that far away.
Hey, Elon!
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Just a few days ago, I posted an article from the Colonial Newsletter. Last night I found that they are making changes. The Colonial Newsletter ceased publication. The new journal will be the Journal of Early American Numismatics, which is not free like the Colonial Newsletter was so unless you are willing to pay for a subscription or can find it through a student or library subscription, you just lost a good resource. Hopefully the old newsletter issues will remain available online for a while. If there is anything I think should be free, it is access to ideas and knowledge.
The academics that always complain about treasure hunters being in it only for the profit, won't do a thing for the public without making sure to make money from it. If they aren't getting a good salary for their leisurely efforts, it takes a grant to get them to move.
Here is a link to the article about the Newsletter's passing.
‘The Colonial Newsletter’ ceasing publication, to be reborn as new journal
Here is a list of articles in the now deceased Colonial Newsletter. You might want to access any articles of interest before they all disappear.
C4N-Index-Author-Winter-2025.pdf
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I have to admit I enjoyed the World Cup. I always like thinking about strategies. It was no different when watching soccer. I don't know, but it seemed to me they could benefit by drawing more from other sports. They already use the pick and roll, prevent defense, and Hail Mary of sorts. I think teams could benefit from using more planned "plays."
US Mint FIFA World Cup 2026 Coins Open for Pre-Order June 4
One thing I don't like about coin collecting is the infinite number of coins. Now there are more. I'll restrict my collecting to what I find.
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People like to put a name on things. There are even words for unidentified things, ie. UFO It seems to be so basically human. The child's first utterance associates a verbal expression with an object, often mama or dada. Associating a word with an object puts the referent (the object) in a category or class, which assists memory organization and storage, but it also has more magical effects. Uttering a word of recognition in social situation has an effect on those who hear it. It draws them into the same shared world. The experience is then not private but part of a social group and interaction. If you are on a safari and spy an elephant, it doesn't seem sufficient to see an elephant, but you hear people, especially youngster cry out "an elephant." Then they'll point to share the experience of seeing and recognizing. Neural networks in several brains comprising the social group light up. It helps build shared world views through this basic expression of recognition. Layer upon layer subjective worlds are formed and shaped. Now it is accomplished not only by social groups but also media, fact checkers and now also AI, which does not share a personal experiential world (though some might disagree with that) but sucks up variously recorded expressions of human language or other available forms of coded information (though some of it is not really information by some definitions).
I hope you'll forgive me, but I hope to show the relevance of this to treasure hunting and metal detecting.
I was recently with a small group of my wife's relatives when one of them repeated a couple of times that "money is just paper." I knew she had more to say about it by I wasn't particularly interested in finding out what point she wanted to make by it so ignored it. First of all, I usually take the word "just" to be a red flag. When someone uses that word, they intend to reduce or diminish something. My reaction is that nothing is "just" anything. If I handed her a piece of toilet paper, it wouldn't be the same as if I handed her a ten-dollar bill, so at the very face of it, the statement was wrong - not to mention that even bills are not paper. It is more of a linen and cotton combination, not to mention the ink and most importantly, the social agreement of value that attaches to it. The word "just," besides being inaccurate, often signals a reductionistic agenda. Things are not simple although there are often advantages to acting as if they are. It can at times be helpful to reduce the infinite and overwhelming complexity of reality. So we lump things into categories and attach labels.
My wife has recently been trying to assess values of various items and has been using AI to help get some idea. It is helpful but occasionally very wrong, which can probably also be said of most authoritative sources, whether they are jewelers, gemologists, investment professional's, physicians or whatever. The advantage of AI is accessibility and speed. In the end, unless you live in a box and your own private world, reality is largely social.
First hydrogen energy car packs 932-mile range and takes just 5 seconds to refuel
In John 18:38, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, "What is truth?" after Jesus declares that He came to testify to the truth.
the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion:
Test the hypothesis using controlled, repeatable procedures. Only one variable (independent variable) is changed at a time, while others are kept constant. Experiments should be repeated to ensure reliability
Percy Williams Bridgman’s operationism (also called operationalism) is the view that the meaning of a scientific concept is exhausted by the set of operations used to measure or apply it www.philosophyprofessor.com. In other words, a concept is defined by the specific procedures we use to observe or quantify it.
Core Idea
Bridgman argued that “we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations”
80 percent of U.S. adults say they believe in a spiritual reality.
It sometimes seems like we desperately hang onto smallest floating twig of understanding to stay afloat in the raging mystery of life. One of my biggest frustration is the infinite lifetmes of study required to learn something of the many things fascinating things to study in this life. Each and every object opens a door into countless additional areas of study.
The social context helps narrow down our areas of interest. It is easy to value those things that are valued in the society. Interests come from experiences and the people in our lives.
I never get bored. I get frustrated by not be able to study all the things that catch my interest. It becomes a bit of a problem for me in this blog. I start a topic and that topic opens many other doors. I was just thinking that I started a series on the future of metal detecting but got off on other things and haven't finished it. I plan to go back and do that sometime.
Not long ago I wanted to find out what metal object was in a conglomerate. I started cleaning the conglomerate and noticed what looked like microfossils. I did a post or two on that topic and still haven't opened the clump. I think I'll do that sometime.
I enjoy writing, but the type of writing I enjoy the most isn't easy and it takes a lot of tie, so I seldom do that kind of writing. I usually settle for simply communicating information. I'm happy with that. I just don't feel like I have the time to present a lot of information AND put it in more artistically pleasing form.
Fact is, you can only do so much in life. That means priorities are very important. You have to make choices and decide how you really want to spend your time and what you want to accomplish with your life.
Percy Williams Bridgman’s operationism (also called operationalism) is the view that the meaning of a scientific concept is exhausted by the set of operations used to measure or apply it www.philosophyprofessor.com. In other words, a concept is defined by the specific procedures we use to observe or quantify it.
Core Idea
Bridgman argued that “we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations”
settle for something that simply conveys information even though it is not as nice as I'd like.
He was merely digging a backyard pool. Suddenly, he hit an $800,000 gold treasure.
But, hey! It isn't bad to disagree. In fact, I'm convinced one of the best things you can do is disagree with yourself.
I know that sounds like heresy. Doesn't that make you conflicted? Isn't it neurotic - or worse?
I say no. When you can look at both sides of the coin, or should I say issue, you weight it out. People used to be able to do that. It seems, that somehow they lost that ability. They can't tolerate complexity. They talk about relativity and personal or subjective truth but can't stand more than one simple overgeneralized view.
But one thing about disagreeing with yourself, is the opportunity it presents for learning and change. Every time you learn something, you change. The process of learning is a process of changing. You can't learn without changing and it wouldn't do you a lot of good to learn if you didn't change something significant.
When I learn something significant, I can look at what I previously believed and say that I was wrong. How can you grow as a person without looking at your old self and recognizing where you were wrong. It doesn't do much good to keep adding new facts to your knowledge base unless you change how you look at things.
Once I was lost and now I'm found. You change. And then you keep changing. All things become new.
One thing the soccer fans might not know about those West Virginia country roads they've singing about is they are hilly, wind around, and when paved, are covered with pot holes.
In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
8:20 Some of the Pharisees asked Jesus, “When will the kingdom of God come?”
Jesus answered, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. 21 People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within[a] you.”
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
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In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
8:20 Some of the Pharisees asked Jesus, “When will the kingdom of God come?”
Jesus answered, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. 21 People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within[a] you.”
Psalm 8:4 “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
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With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
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My wife raises butterflies and being a born "observer," I watch what they do.
There is an area of our yard that is almost always patrolled by a black swallowtail butterfly. It is a very well defined area, and almost every day there is a black swallowtail that patrols the area back and forth, something like the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He occasionally takes a side trip to a bougainvillea to catch a snack or something, but he spends hours each day patrolling. that has been going on for years. There have been several generations. I'd guess there is either something very attractive about that area to male swallowtail butterflies and maybe there is a nurture or genetic component, but a female lays many eggs on one plant but only one male controls that specific area generation to generation. He'll chase competitors off.
The sun knows we can't take go on too long without taking a break to shut down, recharge, reset by exploring dream world's we'd never dare in the full light of day. Fine thing it is for body, mind and spirit.
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
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My wife raises butterflies and being a born "observer," I watch what they do.
There is an area of our yard that is almost always patrolled by a black swallowtail butterfly. It is a very well defined area, and almost every day there is a black swallowtail that patrols the area back and forth, something like the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He occasionally takes a side trip to a bougainvillea to catch a snack or something, but he spends hours each day patrolling. that has been going on for years. There have been several generations. I'd guess there is either something very attractive about that area to male swallowtail butterflies and maybe there is a nurture or genetic component, but a female lays many eggs on one plant but only one male controls that specific area generation to generation. He'll chase competitors off.
In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
---
The sun knows that we can't take go on too long at once and daily turns off at a preset time so we can recharge, reset and explore dreamy world's we'd never dare in the full light of day. Fine thing it is for body, mind and spirit.
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
---
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
My wife raises butterflies and being a born "observer," I watch what they do.
There is an area of our yard that is almost always patrolled by a black swallowtail butterfly. It is a very well defined area, and almost every day there is a black swallowtail that patrols the area back and forth, something like the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He occasionally takes a side trip to a bougainvillea to catch a snack or something, but he spends hours each day patrolling. that has been going on for years. There have been several generations. I'd guess there is either something very attractive about that area to male swallowtail butterflies and maybe there is a nurture or genetic component, but a female lays many eggs on one plant but only one male controls that specific area generation to generation. He'll chase competitors off.
The sun knows that we can't take go on too long at once and daily turns off at a preset time so we can recharge, reset and explore dreamy world's we'd never dare in the full light of day. Fine thing it is for body, mind and spirit.
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
---
In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
---
I saw part of an episode of the Oak Island show. It was the end of the season and they came up dry. I actually pitied them. Some seemed to be on the verge of tears.
[[[[[[[
About the author.
Nothing is more inevitable than an excited beagle being pulled up over the hills and through the weeds and briars by his nose hot on a rf\fresh rabbit trial.
Drawn away by dreams I did not know, the road that took me far from home is calling me back.
First, I'd travel head north on 95 with many others hurrying in both ways over the multiple smooth paved lanes. Then through Georgia and past the place where once years ago a car with an illegal trailer swerved and pushed my Opel GT over the hill sticking the nose of the Opel in the bottom.
The highway continues through some other states. The roads get older, more narrow and wind slowly through the hills as the scenery becomes more familiar but also strange. Things have changed.
Finally, I'm at the intersection to the unpaved road I walked to school everyday. Crossing the old bridge over the creek in the valley, I start up the final hill. There are new houses and the houses I knew are now old. The sheep and cows are gone. Around the bend and up the next grade, there is the house where the Simpson boys lived, but nobody is home. Then Hamilton's. That house looks old and smaller now. Gary died a long time ago, and Loretta maybe ten years ago after she went to Washington D.C.
But what leave me feeling out of place is the old, weathered grandfather barn and the spreading oak tree where the barn owls nested are completely gone. A big, ugly steel maintenance garage stands there now.
On the other side of the road, I look up the long driveway to the house that my dad built. The house is different. The small trees are now large and there are new trees everywhere.
For a moment it is strange and I feel lost, but then through it all I see my dad and mom, I see the neighbor kids. I can see the house and barn as it always was. It is all still there. It is the same place just another time. I'm
===
It must have been 1973, give or take a year, when I sat in an office on the 27th floor of the Tower of Leaning when my dissertation advisor told me I was "perspicacious" and asked if I knew what that meant. I remember that well, probably because I rarely heard anything so positive about myself because my parent's theory of child rearing was that I'd get a big head if they told me I did anything well. I don't know how or if, that actually affected my personality development in any way at all, but for whatever reason, I turned out to be stubbornly independent and very introverted. Maybe I shouldn't, but I like that. And I do think I'm perspicacious, but maybe everybody thinks of themselves that way. I suppose they do.
A half century sounds like a lot of time, but it doesn't really seem that long ago. I'm fond of my memories and wouldn't want to lose them.
The Cathedral of Learning was just across a parking lot from Forbes Field when the Pirates beat the Yankees in the World Series in 1960. Forbes Field was torn down in 1970. I have an old film strip showing my grandma making her way down to the dugout with her box camera to take some pictures of the players. A security guard was starting to walk over her way. She was the extrovert of the family and liked to keep things lively.
I've put years of posts documenting a part of my life on the internet. On occasion I told about parts of my personal life in this blog but over the years I've made many other posts that revealed and documented my thinking and experiences. I posted a lot of photos over the years and told personal stories. Google, AOL and others have vacuumed up a lot of life details.
I like remembering my past and this morning and started to wonder if with AI and all the data that is scanned and encoded could in the future provide AI personal memory assistance. Just to do a little test just to see how it might work, I asked something AI something I knew I had shared in this blog. I asked AI what did the TreasureGuide say were the two most important or beneficial things he ever learned in college. I know I told exactly that in at least one of my posts and wanted to see if AI would pick it up. One of those specific things I mentioned was Operationism. AI didn't catch that. I got some more insight to how AI works. It generalizes a lot, and I've noticed before that it is often wrong.
The answer AI gave me sounded good in a general sense. The story sounded good, kinda like what you'd expect from an ingratiating con man, but one major part of the answer was completely wrong. Maybe AI mistook what others were quoted as saying in my blog for something I said.
At this time my conclusion is that I wouldn't trust AI at this time as a personal memory supplement, but I can imagine that sometime in the future that something like it might be used to help people with memory loss. That, of course, would require the experiences or memories to be recorded or somehow encoded. In my case, I've said a lot online. There are many others that have documented a lot of their lives online and others that easily could. Every teenager has a vast documented digital presence.
Cosidering the massive amount of online documentation that is already online, future developments should make it possible code and store memories much more efficiently. It seems to me that a digital form of memory loss assistance is not that far away.
Hey, Elon!
===
+++++++++
I have to admit I enjoyed the World Cup. I always like thinking about strategies. It was no different when watching soccer. I don't know, but it seemed to me they could benefit by drawing more from other sports. They already use the pick and roll, prevent defense, and Hail Mary of sorts. I think teams could benefit from using more planned "plays."
US Mint FIFA World Cup 2026 Coins Open for Pre-Order June 4
One thing I don't like about coin collecting is the infinite number of coins. Now there are more. I'll restrict my collecting to what I find.
---
People like to put a name on things. There are even words for unidentified things, ie. UFO It seems to be so basically human. The child's first utterance associates a verbal expression with an object, often mama or dada. Associating a word with an object puts the referent (the object) in a category or class, which assists memory organization and storage, but it also has more magical effects. Uttering a word of recognition in social situation has an effect on those who hear it. It draws them into the same shared world. The experience is then not private but part of a social group and interaction. If you are on a safari and spy an elephant, it doesn't seem sufficient to see an elephant, but you hear people, especially youngster cry out "an elephant." Then they'll point to share the experience of seeing and recognizing. Neural networks in several brains comprising the social group light up. It helps build shared world views through this basic expression of recognition. Layer upon layer subjective worlds are formed and shaped. Now it is accomplished not only by social groups but also media, fact checkers and now also AI, which does not share a personal experiential world (though some might disagree with that) but sucks up variously recorded expressions of human language or other available forms of coded information (though some of it is not really information by some definitions).
I hope you'll forgive me, but I hope to show the relevance of this to treasure hunting and metal detecting.
I was recently with a small group of my wife's relatives when one of them repeated a couple of times that "money is just paper." I knew she had more to say about it by I wasn't particularly interested in finding out what point she wanted to make by it so ignored it. First of all, I usually take the word "just" to be a red flag. When someone uses that word, they intend to reduce or diminish something. My reaction is that nothing is "just" anything. If I handed her a piece of toilet paper, it wouldn't be the same as if I handed her a ten-dollar bill, so at the very face of it, the statement was wrong - not to mention that even bills are not paper. It is more of a linen and cotton combination, not to mention the ink and most importantly, the social agreement of value that attaches to it. The word "just," besides being inaccurate, often signals a reductionistic agenda. Things are not simple although there are often advantages to acting as if they are. It can at times be helpful to reduce the infinite and overwhelming complexity of reality. So we lump things into categories and attach labels.
My wife has recently been trying to assess values of various items and has been using AI to help get some idea. It is helpful but occasionally very wrong, which can probably also be said of most authoritative sources, whether they are jewelers, gemologists, investment professional's, physicians or whatever. The advantage of AI is accessibility and speed. In the end, unless you live in a box and your own private world, reality is largely social.
First hydrogen energy car packs 932-mile range and takes just 5 seconds to refuel
In John 18:38, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, "What is truth?" after Jesus declares that He came to testify to the truth.
the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion:
Test the hypothesis using controlled, repeatable procedures. Only one variable (independent variable) is changed at a time, while others are kept constant. Experiments should be repeated to ensure reliability
Percy Williams Bridgman’s operationism (also called operationalism) is the view that the meaning of a scientific concept is exhausted by the set of operations used to measure or apply it www.philosophyprofessor.com. In other words, a concept is defined by the specific procedures we use to observe or quantify it.
Core Idea
Bridgman argued that “we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations”
80 percent of U.S. adults say they believe in a spiritual reality.
It sometimes seems like we desperately hang onto smallest floating twig of understanding to stay afloat in the raging mystery of life. One of my biggest frustration is the infinite lifetmes of study required to learn something of the many things fascinating things to study in this life. Each and every object opens a door into countless additional areas of study.
The social context helps narrow down our areas of interest. It is easy to value those things that are valued in the society. Interests come from experiences and the people in our lives.
I never get bored. I get frustrated by not be able to study all the things that catch my interest. It becomes a bit of a problem for me in this blog. I start a topic and that topic opens many other doors. I was just thinking that I started a series on the future of metal detecting but got off on other things and haven't finished it. I plan to go back and do that sometime.
Not long ago I wanted to find out what metal object was in a conglomerate. I started cleaning the conglomerate and noticed what looked like microfossils. I did a post or two on that topic and still haven't opened the clump. I think I'll do that sometime.
I enjoy writing, but the type of writing I enjoy the most isn't easy and it takes a lot of tie, so I seldom do that kind of writing. I usually settle for simply communicating information. I'm happy with that. I just don't feel like I have the time to present a lot of information AND put it in more artistically pleasing form.
Fact is, you can only do so much in life. That means priorities are very important. You have to make choices and decide how you really want to spend your time and what you want to accomplish with your life.
Percy Williams Bridgman’s operationism (also called operationalism) is the view that the meaning of a scientific concept is exhausted by the set of operations used to measure or apply it www.philosophyprofessor.com. In other words, a concept is defined by the specific procedures we use to observe or quantify it.
Core Idea
Bridgman argued that “we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations”
settle for something that simply conveys information even though it is not as nice as I'd like.
He was merely digging a backyard pool. Suddenly, he hit an $800,000 gold treasure.
But, hey! It isn't bad to disagree. In fact, I'm convinced one of the best things you can do is disagree with yourself.
I know that sounds like heresy. Doesn't that make you conflicted? Isn't it neurotic - or worse?
I say no. When you can look at both sides of the coin, or should I say issue, you weight it out. People used to be able to do that. It seems, that somehow they lost that ability. They can't tolerate complexity. They talk about relativity and personal or subjective truth but can't stand more than one simple overgeneralized view.
But one thing about disagreeing with yourself, is the opportunity it presents for learning and change. Every time you learn something, you change. The process of learning is a process of changing. You can't learn without changing and it wouldn't do you a lot of good to learn if you didn't change something significant.
When I learn something significant, I can look at what I previously believed and say that I was wrong. How can you grow as a person without looking at your old self and recognizing where you were wrong. It doesn't do much good to keep adding new facts to your knowledge base unless you change how you look at things.
Once I was lost and now I'm found. You change. And then you keep changing. All things become new.
One thing the soccer fans might not know about those West Virginia country roads they've singing about is they are hilly, wind around, and when paved, are covered with pot holes.
In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
8:20 Some of the Pharisees asked Jesus, “When will the kingdom of God come?”
Jesus answered, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. 21 People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within[a] you.”
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
-
---
In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
8:20 Some of the Pharisees asked Jesus, “When will the kingdom of God come?”
Jesus answered, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. 21 People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within[a] you.”
Psalm 8:4 “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
---
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
-
---
---
My wife raises butterflies and being a born "observer," I watch what they do.
There is an area of our yard that is almost always patrolled by a black swallowtail butterfly. It is a very well defined area, and almost every day there is a black swallowtail that patrols the area back and forth, something like the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He occasionally takes a side trip to a bougainvillea to catch a snack or something, but he spends hours each day patrolling. that has been going on for years. There have been several generations. I'd guess there is either something very attractive about that area to male swallowtail butterflies and maybe there is a nurture or genetic component, but a female lays many eggs on one plant but only one male controls that specific area generation to generation. He'll chase competitors off.
The sun knows we can't take go on too long without taking a break to shut down, recharge, reset by exploring dream world's we'd never dare in the full light of day. Fine thing it is for body, mind and spirit.
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
---
My wife raises butterflies and being a born "observer," I watch what they do.
There is an area of our yard that is almost always patrolled by a black swallowtail butterfly. It is a very well defined area, and almost every day there is a black swallowtail that patrols the area back and forth, something like the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He occasionally takes a side trip to a bougainvillea to catch a snack or something, but he spends hours each day patrolling. that has been going on for years. There have been several generations. I'd guess there is either something very attractive about that area to male swallowtail butterflies and maybe there is a nurture or genetic component, but a female lays many eggs on one plant but only one male controls that specific area generation to generation. He'll chase competitors off.
In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
---
The sun knows that we can't take go on too long at once and daily turns off at a preset time so we can recharge, reset and explore dreamy world's we'd never dare in the full light of day. Fine thing it is for body, mind and spirit.
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
---
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
My wife raises butterflies and being a born "observer," I watch what they do.
There is an area of our yard that is almost always patrolled by a black swallowtail butterfly. It is a very well defined area, and almost every day there is a black swallowtail that patrols the area back and forth, something like the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He occasionally takes a side trip to a bougainvillea to catch a snack or something, but he spends hours each day patrolling. that has been going on for years. There have been several generations. I'd guess there is either something very attractive about that area to male swallowtail butterflies and maybe there is a nurture or genetic component, but a female lays many eggs on one plant but only one male controls that specific area generation to generation. He'll chase competitors off.
The sun knows that we can't take go on too long at once and daily turns off at a preset time so we can recharge, reset and explore dreamy world's we'd never dare in the full light of day. Fine thing it is for body, mind and spirit.
With the hope of bringing the lessons of deep night to day, I open my eyes in the middle of night just enough to grasp pen in one hand while holding a fleeing dreamworld of deep memory in the other and try to make a single whole of the two
The shy two or three-year-old dressed in a bright Satin costume with top hat feels the spot-light on an intimidating auditorium stage in long line other only of sweet and kind children that are a little older and less shy. It was me. It is me. He is still here, but stays back stage until the sun goes dark and the other spotlight comes on.
The little boy who awakes one Christmas morning delights to see Lionel trains running all around grandma's living room floor is there too. So is the high school field goal kicker that hears the crowd cheer while watching the ball disappear into the snow and darkness as it approaches the cross bar not knowing yet if the game was won or lost. So too is the young man, standing before his first psychology class as a new college instructor, and the consultant creating software to train pilots on the Airbus 300 flight control system at Eastern Airlines or developing training for a new prototype GPS system for Martin Marietta aerospace.
One day somewhere between here and there, past and future, a man looks back at all the people he's been. He is all of them. They are still here. He is them and the sun is returning.
---
In my heaven, the streets aren't paved with gold. In fact, my heaven has no paved roads at all. It has dusty winding roads that small groups of school age children cheerfully walk twice a day during the school year and whenever they want or can during the summer and weekends. On colder days a pure white covering transforms the well tread path into a winter playground interrupted only occasionally by a few well-worn tired motor vehicles struggling to make it through the deep snow or up the icy hill.
In my heaven, I put up grandma's aluminum Christmas tree and decorate her house with wintery scenes populated by little metal skaters, cows, deers, Santa and a manger scene, or peer through the cellophane window at one end of a brightly colored sugar egg to view a three-dimension Easter landscape
The green fields turn from green to brown to white and back again, and the neighbor kids change from picking wild stawberries or playing baseball on the new growth grass to football or hunting and then football when green turns to brown. The kids can't resist a few forbidden attmpts to climb Mr. McNealy's haystacks the seasons change and bundled against the cold, trudge up the snow-covered hill for the pure joy of sliding down it again and again.
In my heaven, brief sorrows exist but transform to sweet memories. They punctuate and emphasize but do not endure.
Rather than streets of gold, I prefer rolling green hills that change colors, creeks that wind through wooded hollows, barns and cows, scattered small yards made by hardworking families and filled with young hope, parents doing their best to make a way, and the sound of laughing kids. My heaven is where I came from. My heaven is my home.
---
I saw part of an episode of the Oak Island show. It was the end of the season and they came up dry. I actually pitied them. Some seemed to be on the verge of tears.
[[[[[[[
About the author.
Nothing is more inevitable than an excited beagle being pulled up over the hills and through the weeds and briars by his nose hot on a rf\fresh rabbit trial.
Drawn away by dreams I did not know, the road that took me far from home is calling me back.
First, I'd travel head north on 95 with many others hurrying in both ways over the multiple smooth paved lanes. Then through Georgia and past the place where once years ago a car with an illegal trailer swerved and pushed my Opel GT over the hill sticking the nose of the Opel in the bottom.
The highway continues through some other states. The roads get older, more narrow and wind slowly through the hills as the scenery becomes more familiar but also strange. Things have changed.
Finally, I'm at the intersection to the unpaved road I walked to school everyday. Crossing the old bridge over the creek in the valley, I start up the final hill. There are new houses and the houses I knew are now old. The sheep and cows are gone. Around the bend and up the next grade, there is the house where the Simpson boys lived, but nobody is home. Then Hamilton's. That house looks old and smaller now. Gary died a long time ago, and Loretta maybe ten years ago after she went to Washington D.C.
But what leave me feeling out of place is the old, weathered grandfather barn and the spreading oak tree where the barn owls nested are completely gone. A big, ugly steel maintenance garage stands there now.
On the other side of the road, I look up the long driveway to the house that my dad built. The house is different. The small trees are now large and there are new trees everywhere.
For a moment it is strange and I feel lost, but then through it all I see my dad and mom, I see the neighbor kids. I can see the house and barn as it always was. It is all still there. It is the same place just another time. I'm