hello friends, wally here. decided rather than telling you all about my adventures, i would share lyrics from a great song by Gunnarolla titled “I Took a Nap” that captures my day…here we go: “I had a lot of things to do today / But you know what I did instead / I took a nap / It was a very good nap / That email / I took a nap / Zoom call / I took a nap / What about your lunch plan / I (ate lunch then) took a nap / House chores / I took a nap / Home workout? / I took a nap / Bath time? / I took a nap… / I woke up from the nap to get things done / But you know what I did instead / I took a nap / It was a very good nap…..” have a great sunday. Wally.
Wally’s Great Adventures (58 – VOLUME UP – I had a lot of things to do today but…)
Walking. On Sunday Morning.

There she is. 7:30 am, December 28, 2022. She’s the middle aged runner that I mentioned in prior posts, a runner who runs every day, every day at least since I’ve been out on these morning walks, and again this morning, 1026 consecutive (almost) mornings, like in a row.
It was a mild December morning, 32° F, but, oh, that sunrise, and oh the photos on that glorious day. I happened to be in the right spot at the right time to get a shot of her coming and going.
I want to use a ‘Lori word’ to describe her, diminutive. I had to look it up. But anyone who runs with the persistence that she does, is anything but diminutive. Driving rain, biting cold, humid August mornings, she’s running. [Read more…]
Walking. On Sunday Morning.
It’s not the red car, but the black sedan behind it. Shot was taken this morning from across the cove, from a distance. At the start and end of my morning walks, I pull in here to take my first and last shots, but not today. Heavy cloud cover, and…
1013 consecutive (almost) days on this Cove Island morning walk. Like in a row. It’s brisk out, 28° F, feels like 23° F.
For the last 6 (?) months, mostly every morning, the black sedan is parked here, overnight. Car running, exhaust drifts upward, condensation drips and pools on the asphalt.
Who are you? What’s your story? Sleep here by choice (not really ‘choice’ with rents at nose bleed levels)? Bad decisions? Bad luck? Working 2 jobs, banking cash for better days ahead? [Read more…]
Walking. In place inaccessible to unbelief.

5:05 am. I peek at the weather app: 27° F, feels like 15° F, wind gusts up to 32 mph.
Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
Hmmmmmm, not feelin’ it.
Everyone in the house sleeps, snuggled under their comforters. Wally snores peacefully. I slide my hand onto his belly, and it moves up and down with his inhale and exhale. What joy this creature has brought, this little ball of life.
I get out of bed. Sigh. Thick wool socks. Smart Wool, long underwear. Hoodie. Snow pants. Lined Boots. Come on Arctic blast, hit me, give me your best shot.
I walk.
Not a soul in the park. No runners. No walkers. No dredgers, who are off for the long weekend. And here I am, 985 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
Surprised, I am, at the ebbs and flows. 12 years here at this blogging thing, and it’s ebbing, a low tide that ebbs 1 day, and ebbs 2 days and ebbs 3 days, followed by a shoulder shrug. Time with Wally. Time with book. Time with Netflix. [Read more…]
Sunday Morning
Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book “The Sabbath”… has this line — “Six days a week we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self.” It’s amazing how much harder that is to do. But I can’t shake the question of, what if I did actually spend a full seventh of my life, which is what the Sabbath is supposed to be, living at a different speed? Who would I be if I knew more than how to work and not work? Who would I be if I knew actually how to rest?
— Ezra Klein, “Ezra Klein Interviews Judith Shulevitz.” The New York Times, January 3, 2023.
Sunday Morning
and I shall have some peace there,
for peace comes dropping slow
— Naomi Shihab Nye, from “The Words Under the Words,” Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.
Notes:
- Photos: Daybreak. 5:11 to 6:00 pm, August 7, 2022. 80° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here (landscape) and here (birds).
- Poem via The Vale of Soul-Making
Sunday Morning
A clear blue sky was hard to take. Marek saw it as emptiness, a place with no heaven in it. He preferred the clouds because he could imagine paradise behind them. He could stare up and focus his eyes on shapes in the clouds, wonder if that was God’s face or God’s hand making an impression, or if God was spying down at him through the gauzy mist. Maybe, maybe.
— Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona (Penguin Press, June 21, 2022)
DK Photo @ Daybreak. 5:12 am, July 16, 2022. 65° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from yesterday here.
Sunday Morning
George & Grace @ Daybreak. 5:35 a.m. July 3, 2022. 72° F. Cove Island Park, CT. More pictures from this morning’s walk here.
Sunday Morning
And the boy went into the elves’ church. He had never seen such people before, so noble and happy. Such is life when it is lived in peace and in song. When the hymn was over, the priest mounted the pulpit and preached a sermon. Never had the boy heard a sermon so beautiful or so touching. And never afterwards did he hear a sermon like it. All his life through he remembered it, meditating upon it in secret and trying always to live up to it; but the theme of the sermon he told to no one. Some people think that it must have been about how in the end good will be triumphant in the life of man. Then the priest went to the altar and intoned in a warm, gentle voice; quite differently from our priests here on earth. It was as if a good hand was laid over his heart Then when the last hymn had been sung, all the people stood up and went out… He kept the memory of this Sunday ever afterwards in his mind and it consoled him when he had to do without the happiness that others enjoy in life; and he grew up into a man pleased with what he had and contented with his lot.
— Halldór Laxness, “Independent People”
Photo: Photo by Tabitha Mort, Portland, Oregon
Sunday Afternoon
I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel
Notes: Quote via Mythology of Blue. Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 7:21 am, January 2, 2022. 52° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.
No religion except…
…No religion except whatever Mary Oliver had going on.
Notes:
- Quote: Monkcore.
- T-Shirt: Online Ceramics
- Inspired by: “Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?” — Mary Oliver, from “Mindful” in “Why I Wake Early” (via Alive on All Channels)
The faith that gives us wings. Or at least a soft place to land.
Notes:
- Post Title: Krystal (Rosario Dawson), in Krystal, Netflix (2018)
- DK @ Daybreak. 7:30 am, October 17, 2021. 51° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
Sunday Morning
A sacrament is something holy happens. It is transparent time, time you can see through to something deep inside time… In other words, at such milestone moments as seeing a baby baptized or being baptized yourself, confessing your sins, getting married, dying, you are apt to catch a glimpse of the almost unbearable preciousness and mystery of life.
Needless to say, church isn’t the only place where the holy happens. Sacramental moments can occur at any moment, at any place, and to anybody. Watching something get born. Making love. A walk on the beach. Somebody coming to see you when you’re sick. A meal with people you love. Looking into a stranger’s eyes and finding out they are not a stranger’s.
If we weren’t blind as bats, we might see that life itself is sacramental.
— Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (HarperOne; September 24, 1993)
Notes:
- Quote: Thank you Make Believe Boutique
- Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 7:01 am, October 3, 2021. 55° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
I like Sunday Nights
It’s Sunday. I like Sunday nights, and this particular time always puts me in a good mood…
A transition into Monday, a waiting room.
Sunday Morning
My father had died in a single-vehicle accident in California, far from those who knew and loved him. As I grieved, my father’s death brought a certain clarity about my calling as a husband and parent. If my relationship with my dad had been marked by brokenness, I wanted my relationship with my wife and children to be marked by healing. It also forced me to re-evaluate my career. Impressing other writers and academics ceased to be my goal. Instead, I would focus on using my words to find beauty and hope. I couldn’t write a different ending for my father’s story, but I could show that a different ending was possible for others.
Over the past year and a half, many people have experienced something similar to what I did when my father died. I am not the only one who has received a terrifying call that wakes us from our slumber and changes us forever. It may have been a notification about a loved one going on a ventilator rather than dying in a car crash, but the trauma is the same. This pandemic has left conversations and lives cut short…
All these changes that people are embarking on during the pandemic make me think that we weren’t that happy before the pandemic. What about our lives prevented us from seeing things that are so clear to us now? When I talked to friends and neighbors about this, two themes emerged. The pandemic has disabused us of the illusion of time as a limitless resource and of the false promise that the sacrifices we make for our careers are always worth it.
Before the pandemic, we knew we were going to die, but we did not believe it. Maybe we believed it, but considered it a problem to be dealt with later. In the meantime, exercise and a reasonable diet was the tithe we paid to our fears. We believed we had time…
We have had to consider our collective mortality. And we are now faced with the question of meaning. Like the biblical psalmist says, “We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped.” (Psalm 124:7). Covid-19 threatened to capture us in its snare, but thus far we have eluded it.
What shall we do with this opportunity?
— Dr. Esau McCaulley, from “We Weren’t Happy Before the Pandemic,Either.” Dr. McCaulley is a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois., (NY Times, August 21, 2021)
Sunday Morning
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
You tell people up here that you’re from the South, and nine times out of ten, they say the same old thing: “I’m sure you miss the sunshine.” Rhonda and I both miss taking sunshine and easy morning commutes for granted. But what we really miss are the laughter and embrace of our mothers and grandmothers and aunties, kin and not kin. We miss the big oak tables in their dining rooms where, as kids in the seventies and eighties, we ate bowl after bowl of their banana pudding as they talked to each other about how much weight you’d gained, like you weren’t even there. We miss helping them snap green beans and shell peas sitting at their kitchen tables watching The Young and the Restless on the TV perched on the pass-through. We miss how they loved Victor Newman, hated Jill Foster, and envied Miss Chancellor and how she dripped diamonds and chandeliers.
We miss their bare brown arms reaching to hang clothes on the line with wooden pins. We miss their sun tea brewed all day in big jars on the picnic table in the backyard, then later loaded with sugar and sipped over plates of their fried chicken in the early evening. We miss lying next to them at night in their four-poster beds with too-soft mattresses covered by ironed sheets and three-generation-old blankets. We miss their housecoats, perfumed with Absorbine Jr. liniment and hints of the White Shoulders they’d spritzed on from an atomizer that morning before church. We miss tracing the soft folds in their skin when we held hands and watched our favorite TV shows in their beds. Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, and Falcon Crest.
We miss how they laughed and were easy with each other. How their friendships lasted lifetimes, outlasting wayward husbands and ungrateful children. Outlasted that time Alma caught Joe cheating and she whacked him on the top of the head with the sword he’d brought back from the war, but he told the people at the hospital he didn’t know who did it. Outlasted having to hide your medicine bottles in your shoes because, otherwise, seven of your nine children were liable to steal them. We miss how they seemed to judge everyone but themselves. Or maybe that judgment was in the “nerve” pills they procured from the Chinese doctor on Bay St. who didn’t ask questions. We miss their furtive cups of brown liquor on Friday and unabashed cries for Jesus come Sunday.
We miss their one gold tooth that made us wonder who they had been as young women. We miss their blue crabs, the shells boiled to a blood red in wash tubs atop bricks over makeshift fires built in the yard. The wash tubs reminded us of cauldrons, full of rock salt– and cayenne-drenched water bubbling and rolling, mesh bags of seasonings and halved onions and peppers floating on top, along with potatoes and ears of corn. We miss how they stood over those cauldrons like witches, stirring a potion. With sweat beading on the tips of their noses and smoke swirling around their hands and wrists, they wielded long-handled spoons to press the frantic, flailing crabs toward their deaths.
We miss how they made our Easter dresses and pound cakes and a way out of no way.
— Deesha Philyaw, from “Snowfall” in “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” (West Virginia Press, September, 2020)
Notes:
- Let’s rate this book as: “Wow.” And Highly Recommended. Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Winner of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award, and so deserving.
- Kirkus Book Review: “Tender, fierce, proudly Black and beautiful, these stories will sneak inside you and take root.”
- Los Angeles Review of Books: “Her characters create intimacy and have hope, not despite their ugly odds but because of them.”
Sunday Morning
All gods are homemade,
and it is we who pull their strings,
and so,
give them the power to pull ours.
Notes: Quote Source. Photo: DK, Feb 5, 7:25 a.m. Cove Island Park.
Sunday Morning
How many times have you noticed that it’s the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning.
— Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers
Notes:
- Photo: DK, Daybreak. 7:35 am. Jan 24, 2020. 20° F, feels like 7° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
- Quote Source: Thank you The Hammock Papers
Sunday Morning
The Sun’s rays shimmered through the needles of the tall pine tree overhead, and the grass glistened with dew as Joshua walked through the meadow, deep in thought. Sunday morning was quiet in Auburn. No noisy traffic broke the peaceful silence of the Sabbath rest. Sunday should be that way everywhere so people could give their wearied souls a rest from the nerve-shattering noise of their workdays. The quiet of nature is God’s tranquilizer.
— Joseph F. Girzone, from “Joshua: A Parable for Today” (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983)
Notes:
- “Joshua, a Parable for Today” was a gift to me from our virtual blogging friend Ray Visotski. Ray’s Blog can be found at Mitigating Chaos. Ray, I’m grateful for the gift (which will stay with me) and for the friendship. (BTW, to tie into this quote, I looked for a pine tree and could not find one, and the grass was glistening but not with dew but with ice – and the meadow will have to be replaced with Long Island Sound and the Atlantic – – but the tranquilizer was all there.)
- Photo: DK, Cove Island Park this morning @ 7:28 a.m.