J.D. Porter's Blog, page 3

Monday Musings – 19 February

Yesterday, we returned from a memorable weekend in Elijay, GA celebrating Karen’s birthday—the number of which I shall not reveal. Suffice to say it’s not a special ‘milestone’ birthday, like the one I will celebrate in the fall. But it did cause me to reflect on what a year of milestones 2024 is going to be.

My dad passed away 20 years ago in June and in July, my 8th grandchild (another Porter boy) will be born to my son Ian and his wife Kelly. In August, Karen and I will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. Then, in November, my granddaughter Jasmine turns 20, our daughter-in-law Kelly turns 30, and I will turn 75. I am tempted to feel old, but I don’t. I am happy. And I feel fortunate to see these generations coming after me.

I went for a bike ride when we returned from our weekend travels to shake off the aches of the drive and as I peddled into my driveway at the end of the ride, Dan Fogelberg’s 1990 song Forefathers was finishing on my ‘oldies’ playlist:

And the sons become the fathers and their daughters will be wives
As the torch is passed from hand to hand, and we struggle through our lives
Though the generations wander, the lineage survives
And all of us, from dust to dust, we all become forefathers by and by

This often happens to me when I am chasing a thought and seeking inspiration for Monday morning. This time it was Dan Fogelberg in my earbuds reminding me we all become forefathers by and by—if we’re lucky.

Monday Musings – 12 February

On this date in 1733, James Oglethorpe and 114 companions scrambled up a 40-foot bluff overlooking the Savannah River and founded the colony of Georgia. According to the Georgia Historical Society, the purpose of the 13th (and last) of the British colonies was to serve as a buffer between Spanish Florida and the English colonies. In time, Georgia grew to become the largest colony east of the Mississippi, but as a buffer against those pesky Floridians, it wasn’t very effective. Mercer University recruited me out of St. Petersburg, Florida in 1967 to play basketball. And in 2004, Georgia once again allowed me into the state to manage a 700-acre park in Albany.

So, Georgia is on my mind—because it was a chance visit to the Atlanta Zoo in the late 1960s that launched my zoo career; because I have a master’s degree from UGA; and because I am a lifelong fan of the Atlanta Braves. I’ve now lived in Georgia for more than 20-years and I don’t intend to leave. So, pardon me if this old Florida cracker doffs his hat in honor of Georgia Day this February 12.

Monday Musings – 5 February

As a white child of the Jim Crow South, I probably have little right to opine on Black greatness. But during Black History Month, I like to remember someone I have admired since I learned his story. He and I are kindred spirits even though he was black, and we were born nearly one hundred fifty years apart. We both became Masons when we lived in Ohio—he in Oberlin and me a few miles to the West in Toledo. We both love to build things—I build furniture and he built bridges. And we both loved our mules. I drove a mule wagon for a few years, and he once sued the Federal government to try to recover some mules the Union Army “requisitioned” from him during the Civil War.

Horace King was born in South Carolina in 1807 and, though born into slavery, he grew up to become a master carpenter and bridge builder who gained his freedom and went on to raise a family of builders. One of his son’s bridges is still in use at Stone Mountain Park.

King is seldom mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, but he lived an extraordinary life, as noted in my 2022 blogs:

Horace King

Horace King – The Man

So, here’s to Horace King—a black man who somehow stood up against the power of whiteness in the pre-Civil War South; A skilled craftsman who became a shrewd businessman; a former slave who had compassion for the man who once owned him; a man who deserves to be remembered.

Monday Musings – 29 January

I rode my bike up Atlanta’s famous Beltline Trail toward Piedmont Park last week. As I crossed highways, passed a loft apartment building that once churned out Ford Model T cars, and rode behind the old Sears Roebuck warehouse (now the Ponce City Market), I was reminded why this pathway is here. It was once an active rail line.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of railroads to the development of cities like Atlanta. Rail was the only way to transport goods long distances and on any given rail-line, dozens of short sidings allowed locomotives to drop off and pick up cars at various businesses along the way. You can see the remnant of an old rail siding behind the Ponce City Market.

One such siding allowed the railroad to deliver Atlanta’s first elephant to Piedmont Park in the summer of 1890, prior to her 5-mile walk to the zoo. I wrote about it in my September 2019 blog, Atlanta’s Elephant Parade. I wanted to see the park for myself—see if there was any trace of the elephant that was once housed there. There was not. And the only sign of the railroad that brought her is the Beltline Trail, still bustling after all these years.

Monday Musings – 22 January

The optimist says, “The glass is half full.” The pessimist says, “The glass is half empty.” The rationalist says, “This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”       Thomas Cathcart

I am a worrier by nature, so I guess that makes me a glass-half-empty kind of guy. And I must be in good company, because according to a recent international survey, more than half of young people think humanity is doomed. But I do love a story that turns me on my head and the January 2024 episode of the TED Radio Hour Facing the world’s problems—without the doom and gloom spiral did just that. One of the presenters, environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie, actually has a positive message about one of the most pressing issues of our time, climate change.

Ritchie’s seemingly outlandish suggestion is that far from being the “last generation,” as some climate activists call themselves, today’s youth have the opportunity to be the first generation in human history to achieve true sustainability. For Ritchie, this would mean both protecting our environment and providing a good life for everyone alive today.

According to the blurb about her new book, Not the End of the World, it has become fashionable to think we’re all going to die from climate change. But Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, she suggests, we’ve made so much progress on climate problems that “we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history. These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed.”

Finally, some good news about our future. My glass is still half empty, but Hannah Ritchie has made that glass a little bit smaller.

Monday Musings – 15 January

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.    Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963

I often ride my bicycle past the unpretentious house on Auburn Avenue where Martin Luther King, Sr (‘Daddy King’) raised his three children. And I occasionally ride by the house of one of Daddy King’s contemporaries up on Briarcliff Road. The Briarcliff mansion was part of the 42-acre estate of Asa ‘Buddie’ Candler, Jr., the fabulously wealthy son of one of the founders of the Coca Cola company. Candler dabbled in real estate, but he was primarily known as an eccentric socialite with a big, boisterous personality.

King and Candler could hardly be more different, but they did have one thing in common with each other—and with me. They both loved animals. The millionaire surrounded his mansion with his own private zoo in the 1930s while Daddy King’s favorite chore as a boy, according to his autobiography, was brushing the family mule on cold winter mornings before he went to school.

The legacy of the two men—one famous and one humble; one rich and one poor; a flashy zoo man and a simple mule lover—is reflected in their homes. The Briarcliff mansion is boarded-up, vacant, and decaying. The two-story, frame Queen Anne style house at 501 Auburn Avenue is a National Historic Monument. It is the 1929 birthplace of Daddy King’s son and namesake, Martin Luther King, Jr.—the man whose peaceful fight for racial justice transformed a nation and whose eloquent “I have a dream” speech still inspires me today.

Monday Musings – 8 January

“Whenever an elder dies, a library burns down.” African proverb.

One of the reasons I like to write is that I have stories I want to pass on before my library burns down.  I wish my parents and grandparents had written some of their stories. Their histories are relegated to faded memories and tattered photos in cardboard boxes. Their libraries are now ashes. This was brought home to me this past weekend when I attended the memorial service for my sister-in-law’s mother, Dottie Row. She was the last surviving member of our parents’ generation. I shall miss ‘Mama Row’. I wonder what her stories were.

And so, I write—long stories (novels) and short stories (newspaper articles); fiction (made-up stuff) and nonfiction (mostly true). I write about animals, nature, and the world as I see it.  I have a collection of essays that I will publish as a book this spring. I have a novel that is being reviewed by my editor and should be ready for an agent later this year. And I have an idea for a nonfiction book on the history and evolution of the American zoo. These aren’t exactly urgent projects, but at my age, I need to keep writing. My library’s not burning yet, but I think I smell smoke.

Monday Musings – 1 January 2024

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” —Franz Kafka

Milestone birthdays tend to end in “0”. When I turned 70, my friends and family made a big deal of it. If I survive to 80, I suppose I’ll be honored for that, too. But this year I’ll celebrate my 75th birthday and having lived ¾ of a century seems a worthwhile time for reflection.

Last year, I read the obituaries of friends and colleagues like Robert Belloir (one of my basketball teammates at Mercer University) and Terry Maple (A fellow zoo director who resurrected Zoo Atlanta in the 1980s). They were in their 70s, so their passing hit close to home.

I am thankful to be enjoying my retirement and the time it affords me to write, because I still have plenty to say. So, in 2024 (my 75th time around the sun), I’m going to share some thoughts about the world from an old white guy’s perspective. But I’m not one of those bitter old white guys who misses the good old days. I’m a happy old white guy who’s tired of hearing from angry, entitled people who hate the government, hate immigrants, and hate people of color. I want to love my neighbor and see the beauty in the world. My anthem will be one of my favorite Alan Jackson songs: Things that Matter, (and Things that Don’t). Give it a listen and you’ll hear what I’m talking about.

This year, I’m looking for a publisher for two more books—a non-fiction book (a collection of essays I wrote for the Albany Herald newspaper) and a third novel to complete my trilogy. I look forward to exploring metro-Atlanta on my bicycle, watching my wife’s garden bloom in the spring, and the million times I will say, “Damn, I sure didn’t see that coming.”

So, here’s to 2024. Let’s get out and see the beauty and appreciate the things that matter.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

The Southern Plantation

From my soon-to-be-released book: Roaming, Rambling, and Reminiscing: Musings from a South Georgia Mule Wagon. Essay #5, The Southern Plantation was originally published in the Albany Herald January 19, 2022. “I don’t consider myself particularly ‘woke’ in the modern vernacular, but I did find myself uncomfortable admitting in my books that I drove a mule wagon on a southern ‘plantation’.

Giddy Up, Mule

From my upcoming book:

Roaming, Rambling, and Reminiscing: Musings from a South Georgia Mule Wagon, A compilation of my favorite articles from the Albany Herald. Giddy Up, Mule was originally Published March 8, 2017.

“If you want to gain an appreciation of the conveniences of modern transportation, try driving a team of mules for a few months.”