Playing the saw

I wore out my brain with all that walking and thinking yesterday, so today I just hung out with your many excellent comments and then took my friend Alex to the Audubon Society, where there were some lovely wounded owls being taken care of. I was able to get close enough to photograph them with my 35mm, but I didn't like my owl pictures. You have to know what you're not. I'm not a nature photographer.

Then I went out to get Taiga some grain-free food, and I stumbled across a group called Dirty Kid Discount busking on the corner. They were good, and they had a kind of blue-grass sound and a woman lead singer, but what stopped me was the saw.

Suddenly I was four years old in North Carolina, on the back stoop of the hardware store in the Black part of town where my grandpa worked. The store smelled of feed sacks, fresh nails, and rope. There were packets of seeds for the farmers, a room for cutting glass for window panes, and every kind of shovel, hoe, and shiny tackle. Behind the store was a blacksmith shop, and between the store and the blacksmith, in the alley, a group of musicians sometimes rehearsed their jug band in preparation for Saturday night gigs at the juke joints: a saw, some spoons, a washboard, a couple of jugs, and a guitar. I checked Youtube to see if I could find a group like the one I remember, and this one comes close, though it doesn't have a saw. As it happens one of the best saw-players on Youtube is Japanese. If you'd like to hear some really fantastic saw, check here.

My apologies to the other members of Dirty Kid Discount who were busking with the saw player, and to their dog. I've left them out of the picture because I had the camera set for the shady area where the owls were, and I forgot to change the ISO, and I blew out all the highlights on everybody. That white spot on the right margin is the elbow of the guitar player. Fortunately the saw player was in the shade.