Tag Archives: Paul Harvey

Let’s Go In There

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LetsGoInThere1863

See way back in there where there’s that black doorway? Let’s go in there. There has got to be something really cool back in there. Let’s go check it out. Many times you’ve been watching one of those movies where there are a bunch of teenagers in an old spooky place and one of them says “Hey, Let’s go in the basement. What’s the worst that could happen?” Why wouldn’t there be a deranged guy with a chainsaw down there in the dark.

But that’s Hollywood and this is real life. There’s no chainsaw toting guy in there. The Anasazi didn’t have chainsaws. It’s unclear if they even had metal. The darkness of that doorway draws you in, you know you want to see what’s in there. Was it simply a storage room or was it used for a far different purpose? Are there secrets you can see on the walls, written maybe way high up where the writer had to stand on someone’s shoulders to put his message there. Maybe it was the bedchamber of some Anasazi princess that waited endlessly for the King to visit. Or a place where they kept the royal scrolls filled with the history and exploits of heroes long dead. Can’t tell standing here. We need to go in.

How come we’re like that? Cursed with an undying curiosity to find stuff out. I guess you might not be but I am. For me it is the constant desire to find out the rest of the story. You may remember Paul Harvey, the man with a million stories. He’d start a story and you would be riveted in your seat as you listened to it unfold, knowing that was more here than met the eye, or in this case the ear, as he led you down the stories’ trail. Then just as he’d get to the part that explained it all he’d go for a commercial break and you’d be left hanging there, waiting for the rest of the story. He’d always come back and tell you the surprise ending, unless you were unlucky enough to have someone change the station, or the radio signal would conk out, then you’d be stuck.

Then you’d be left waiting for the rest of the story, sometimes for days, sometimes for years. I never remember the completed stories, they’re gone from my memory. But I do remember the ones I missed the endings of. Even now to this day, decades later in some cases, I’m waiting for the rest of the story. I’ll know it when I hear it. Every once in a while I would get the answer to one of those uncompleted stories and I’d feel like I had gotten a present. The, “Oh, So that’s the rest of the story” feeling. That was always a very good feeling, a satisfied feeling.

So right now we don’t know what went on in that room back there in the dark. The story’s not finished, Let’s go find out.

The Gleaners

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The Gleaner2305click to enlarge

If you go to France and you go to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which is just down from the left bank McDonald’s, you will find a famous painting by Jean-François Millet, a French guy, called the Gleaners (the painting not the French guy). He painted it in 1857 and called it that because that is what was going on in the painting and because they liked short names back then.

It depicts three supposedly French women, we’re not sure if they’re French or not because he didn’t say. They could just as easily been Croatian or Moldavian or even Dutch, but that’s beside the point. What is the point is that these women are called Gleaners because they would go into the fields after the harvest and pick up bits of whatever had just been harvested, take it home, put in it linen sacks, hit those sacks with a stick to settle the contents and store them in a storage unit known as a gleaner locker, for use during the cold winter that was just down the road. Apparently a bunch of people did this as a way to cut the high cost of living. It was way before Costco or Wal-Mart or Sam’s.

A lot of you are probably sitting there right now saying “Yeah, So?” but what you don’t know is that Jean-François Millet, or Johnny Millet as he was known here, was a huge traveler. Not huge like 420 lbs. and having to book two seats all the time huge, but huge as in he traveled a lot. Everywhere he could get reservations. He was never home. He did this because it was hard to come up with new ides every time he wanted to do a painting and like all artists you have got to keep churning this stuff out.

It was on one of his journeys that he came to America and went straight to Rocky Mountain National Park to see what was happening. There he met a park ranger and had an idea that would change the art world completely and earn him a permanent place in Art history classes forever. This ranger whose name has been lost in the dim recesses of the historical past, found Johnny looking down a rock strewn hillside on Trail Ridge road. He was raptly watching many little creatures darting out into the meadow and harvesting huge mouthfuls of grass which they would then bring back to their dens, put in linen sacks, hit those sacks with a stick to settle the contents and store them in a storage unit known as a Pica locker.

“What are those marvelous creatures?” he asked in a French accent that totally gave away where he was from. “They’re gleaners, a form of rodent that lives above the tree line, that harvests grass to sustain them through the long cold winters ” replied the ranger “but as they are from the Lagomorphs family or more precisely the Ochotonidae order we intend to call them Pikas.” “Mon Dieu” said Johnny Millet and then and there the light bulb went off and a work of art was born. The rest is history, or Art History, to be exact. Johnny caught the next clipper ship back to France and soon The Gleaners was on the wall at the Musée d’Orsay. Now American tourists pay good money to look at it not knowing that the idea was taken from the side of Trail Ridge road in Rocky Mountain National Park. And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, You know the rest of the story.