The
Shouldered Calm
(Lake Wildwood, autumn 2022)
A Calm; clear and soft like baby eyes,
Its face upturned and placidly waiting, as though Mother’s
kiss hovers above.
Its face quivers, when the breath of Mother’s cooing babble
blows across, eyes trembling with the million rippling lines broken and mended,
second by second as the Calm lies wriggling.
Father steps away, his lingering glance cast across from
behind curtains of deepening green alive with the droning of his hummed song,
thrumming from among the leaves.
Above the calm, Mother glows, Father’s side-wards light
sculpting in bas-relief her gentle smile, a million times glimmering in the
rippling eyes of the Calm.
The Calm; shouldered about by toy boxes and boughs and ticking trinkets, sliding moment by moment into the encroaching shade, the toys and their imagined lives going about in the time before dreams begin, playing and laughing, upon the drowsy shoulders of the Calm.
About Phil aka alFalaq
al-Falaq is a writer and illustrator living in Atlanta, Georgia. He loves cats and shares his home with an ornery fur ball with nine tales, at least! His collection of poetry and short stories, Threadbare is available on Amazon.
Pop-Up
Shops and vending have become preeminent events in our modern landscape, as
throngs of DIY’ers and fledgling entrepreneurs strive to leverage their unique
talents and skills to engage with a public ever more desiring of boutique
products and services but also ever more drawn to the convenience of ‘on demand’
delivery and shopping online. Vending events
provide opportunities to set up shop, unburdened by the hefty weight of
mutli-year lease agreements, to test out marketing approaches or product
response, while also creating a space with a special chic or vibe for folks to
hang out for a day and try something new.
On May 15, 2021, DAP Tales and I and fellow GNG member Yvonne Walker
took to the streets, Pryor Street in downtown ATL, to be exact, meet the
public, met some local vendors and just hang out.
Vendors Across The City is an intermittent pop-up event that takes its moniker from the vendor’s coalition of the same name, a group of merchants and independent business people seeking to take advantage of today’s shifting retail climate. This time it was in a small street-side lot a mere stone’s throw away from Turner Field parking. Warm, bright weather, bustling traffic and a constant pedestrian presence: all the hallmarks of an ideal vending day in the heart of Atlanta.
Yvonne tables glittered in the early afternoon sun, showing off the many-hued, polished stones of her Artistic Kitten Collection of handmade jewelry and adornments.
Just next door to DAP & I, on the other side, was GNG Friend Jenelle Charleswell, whose Nelly Fash Balloon Decor had created an entrance to our vending world, by way of an array of balloons in a rainbow arch. When not making parties and events come alive with color, Jenelle also is a seamstress, and has sewn by hand a custom costume for our future RGN mascot. Thanks, Jenelle!
Beats and melodies always set off the vibe right, at any good vending event and the air stayed filled with music as DJ Anthology kept it live, all afternoon.
Although the space itself was not large, the vendors had come out in full force and there was some of everything you could want to find available: clothing, Party Decor, a Pop-Up nail salon, mixed drinks in single serving bottles, cigars for the smoke crowd, and of course, food of at least a few different flavors.
The Bean had come to hang out with us for the day, and got some curry and rice from Friends For Hire Catering, before joining me on my rounds to meet all our fellow vend-folk.
I myself waited until I had traversed the
full gamut before finally getting my grub on from Mack’s Smokehouse; he had
pulled his smoker-on-wheels all the way from Texas. Props to Big Mack on the ribs! For dessert, we grabbed a couple of slices of
cake from Dee’z Little Cakes.
By
the time we packed up and pulled out for the day, we hadn’t done too badly on
Primary Colors & Me sales, our bellies were good to go and we’d enjoyed a
music filled day of that special vibe that is at the core of the pop-up vending
experience. Welcome to the modern era of
commerce, Y’all!
Classic
Flare, Local Wares and that Summer-y,
Late Autumn Air
Anyone who’s been in Albany, Georgia
for the Holiday Season knows that, if you’re dreaming of a white Christmas in
South Georgia, you’re more than likely to wake up from that dream into a bright
day, flush with unabashed sunshine and drawing along under near-eighty degree
temperatures. And if you’re me, you
don’t mind. Me and Hot Days are friends,
and although autumn is my favorite time of year, I’m perfectly fine if Summer
decides to take its sweet time packing its bags, hanging around nigh unto the
winter months, if it pleases, which was exactly what seemed to have happened,
in the final months of 2021. No
complaints from me, as it made for a balmy, comfortable Sunday for DAP Tales
and I to visit the Classic Car Show and Arts & Crafts Fair, at the Exchange
Club Fairgrounds, in Albany.
The fairgrounds, essentially a spacious lot in Southwest Albany with some low-lying buildings, loitered under a broad sky of pale blue and streaked with the wispy clouds of early December. We found a parking space within the expanse of tawny, season-withered grass, bought our wrist bands from three older fellas in their trademark orange Exchange Club vests in a small, windowed tickets booth and proceeded into the main building, where most of the action was.
The space was neither large nor small, and was neither crowded nor sparse, but housed a fair array of local vendors, their tents or tables brightly displaying their wares. Strangely, the very first table seen as we walked through the door into the space, was what looked to be an almost random assortment of rustic farming tools and machine parts, mostly corroded and seemingly unrelated.
I didn’t see any
signs or labels on the bins and no one was there for me to ask what it was. I chalked it up to being an Albany thing and
kept it moving. Beside the unlabeled
agrarian history exhibit was a lovely family positioned at a table labeled as
the Simply Beautiful Candle Company, featuring an attractive collection of
scented candles and other bath-and-bed sundries. Their candles are hand-crafted and we bought
one scented in my favorite, frankincense & myrrh, because DAP Tales said it
smelled like me. It did. Also, it smelled lovely later, when lit in
our room.
Across from Simply Beautiful was
McDonald’s Farm (don’t sing it!), whose eye catching honey colored tent
sheltered a table laden with many varieties of their locally farmed pure
honey. Though I do like honey, I’m
nothing of a connoisseur; I’ve always thought that the taste of honey is what
honey tastes like. But having a chance
to sample pure, unrefined honeys made by bees with access to specific floral
sources was truly eye opening. The
flavors were dramatically different, ranging from the sharp and almost pungent,
to the robustly sweet, to the mild and mellow.
Thanks, Monte! It was a pleasure
to speak with you and to taste what your bees have been up to.
We meandered at ease, speaking with
the vendors. Most of their offerings are
made by hand, with materials from local sources: jewelry, clothing, baked goods
and fudge, flags of assembled stained wood.
Photographer Robin Bushnell offers her view, timelessly recorded, of
nearby places and the people and things there.
I loved her image of a moored boat, captured awash in that day’s passing
evening light. Check out her website to view some of those wonderful pics.
Close to the second door of the
building was Martha Jane’s Jams & Jellies, a broad spread with rim-to-rim
jars of pretty much every kind of jam or jelly you could be looking to put on
some toast or whatever you like to put your jams and jellies on. Strawberry, blackberry, probably any berry
you can pick in Georgia; peach, jalapeno; I think there was a yellow root
jelly, even. I picked up a tasty pepper
sauce from her that I put in my greens; it’s nice.
That was the first half of the floor space. The second was occupied by ranks of classic cars, their domed cabins and chrome-trimmed grills glittering in the floodlights from overhead. Chevelle Super Sports and Mustangs sat silently, posed for inspection wearing their red, black, white or silver candy coated paint jobs. Chrome accents, polished like mirrors, reflected us like a fun house as we walked past. Spotless interiors boasted curvaceous, stitched leather.
Right in the center aisle, was a grass-green Mustang fastback, almost exactly like the one my parents had when I was five or six years old, except ours hadn’t been a convertible.
I think
my favorite of the bunch, though, was the Rolls Royce, with its solid
vulcanized rubber tires on spoked wheels under sweeping, flanged fenders and
its canister headlamps. It looked like
something straight out of The Great Gatsby, and its panache and classiness
hadn’t been diminished, not even slightly, by its many decades. To the back of the exhibit hall, a
car-exhibitor, preparing to leave, fired up his 50’s era Chevy convertible and
just for a moment, the whole place, from sheet metal wall to sheet metal wall,
shook with a thunderous roar and a persistent rumbling, like a great beast
rising from a century of slumber. “Yep,
it runs,” a show attendee who had been speaking with the exhibitor beforehand
said, grinning, as eager motor-heads ran over to grab a video with their phones
or just smile.
Peters Performance, 408 Sands Dr, Albany, GA 31705
The only thing out in the actual fairgrounds we spent time to see was when DAPTales took a moment to sit down with Santa, who was in the place, taking photos. He seemed jovial, but I wasn’t sure how well Albany’s summery Christmas weather was treating him, in that fluffy red suit. Well, he can have his North Pole climate; a li’l Yuletide sweat never hurt anybody.
al-Falaq
is a writer and illustrator living in Atlanta, Georgia. He loves cats and
shares his home with an ornery fur ball with nine tales, at least! His collection of poetry and short stories,
Threadbare is available on Amazon.
American
Axes
No Grudge Required to Bury the Hatchet
For birthday revelry, what could possibly match up to burying the ole log-splitter a couple of inches into a helpless wooden target, splinters raining like June sleet? Nothing, that’s what!
DAP Tales’s birthday sets right in the early
weeks of spring, so we needed something suitably spring-ish to do to
celebrate. Anyone who knows DAP, knows
she’s a real Viking at heart, so hiring a gondolier for a serenade over a
stagnant pond or traipsing through a bloom garden filled with bees isn’t going
to, ahem, hack it. But tossing
honed axes like some modern day frontiers-folk?
Perfect!
American Axes, at 821 Livingston Ct suite G, Marietta, GA, had just what we needed. Surprisingly located inside a corporate office park, the setting in no way distracted from the excitement of the experience and if it had been raining, all the better! For a very reasonable fee, we reserved a private room for throwing, though open lanes areas are also available.
With a private room, it’s only your loved
ones and close friends you’ll need to worry about beheading, not random
strangers, which is convenient, for the legal minded? To prevent any accidental dismemberment,
though, their trained axe experts will walk you through the safety rules and
how-to’s of getting that perfect axe throwing mojo.
It is an adult oriented activity (must be older than 12 to throw) but its suitable fun for the whole family. Those who don’t throw can keep score, like our Beanie did, but we did break the rules one time... eep!
They don’t serve alcohol (for obvious reasons), though it is allowed if you have you own (for obvious reasons), though open drunkenness is not tolerated (for obvious reasons) and no horseplay is allowed (for obvious reasons). And nothing announces you’re getting ready for fun like signing your name on a waiver.
Happy Birthday, DAP
Tales! You can check out American Axes
online, to see if it’s right for you; I’m just a blogger, so I wooden know. But hey, you did axe.
