Core Memories | LISB

Hey y’all!

You may have noticed that last week, there was no issue of LISB. That is because we were on vacation.

It was our 17^th anniversary, and some friends had lent us their house in New Smyrna Beach, Florida while they were out of town and so we drove 13 hours and spent the next four days offline, smelling salt air and eating good food.  

We have some friends who do a grand vacation every other year. Maybe it’s Disney, maybe the beach, maybe California. Whatever it is, it’s big, and it’s long – usually for at least two weeks. The rest of the time, they save up for it. They scrimp on all sorts of things for two years so they can do the “big vacation”. Two weeks of ecstasy, and then back to the grind, for another 102 weeks of scrimping.

It works for them, and I’m not here to yuck somebody else’s yum, but that’s not for us. Instead, we try to take 3-5 mini vacations a year, usually of 2-3 days duration. They tend to be 3-6 hours away by car, so they are drivable and, even with the high cost of gas right now, very affordable. Because it is only a few days, it is much easier to arrange.

It’s easier to find someone to feed your cat for a weekend than it is for two weeks. It’s easier to take a day off work than it is fourteen of them. And of course, it costs much less.

We stay in business-class hotels (think Hampton Inn, or Courtyard) when we get there and when we do spend money, it tends to be on experiences, not on stuff. We try hard to arrange each mini-vacation around a core experience. Sometimes it’s a meal at a restaurant, sometimes it’s a museum or a show or a visit with friends. But each trip is tied to a core experience, a core memory.

Like this trip to New Smyrna Beach: The core experience was originally supposed to be a nice dinner out. We went to RiverPark Terrace, a local place that came highly recommended. The food was amazing, the service delightful. 10/10 would do again.

But the people at the table next to us struck up a conversation with us, and one of them mentioned that while we were in town, we must check out Smyrna Dunes Park. After looking it up, I agreed.

We spent the next morning walking a two mile boardwalk that circled a 184 acre protected beachside park covered in dunes and native plants. We saw magnificent beach views, gopher tortoises, and beautiful vistas. Had it been the only thing we did, it would have been worth the drive. It cost us $10.

Sometimes core memories don’t have to be planned, or budgeted for.

It feels almost cliche at this point, but in my first ever apartment, I had a print of one of Monet’s many waterlilies paintings. I think it was this one. But cliche or not, I have always been drawn to it. In this poem, Robert Hayden invites us into the painting as a way to deal with the horrors of the world. (NY Times gift link courtesy of LISB members - thank you!).

The David Rumsey map collection contains more than 150,000 maps in its online archives - completely searchable, and going back to the year 1500.

Think of it as Facebook for pandas - profiles (with genealogy, location, age and sex) for 134 of the 808 pandas in captivity worldwide.

Some highlights from the Nikon “Small World 2026” contest - photomicrography at its finest. (gift link.)

The Last Museum is an art search engine - it purports to be the largest art search engine in the world, with more than six million entries indexed. When I’m feeling down, sometimes I will go there and search for cats, or goldfish, or butterflies.

The most clicked link in the last issue was

I’ve been writing away over on my blog, with notable entries since the last issue being this one about the limits of AI and creativity (with Wendell Berry and Will D. Campbell shoutouts), a short post on the sixth anniversary of my dad’s death, and this memory of the time I took Mom and Dad to the beach, ten years ago this week.

There are other short links and notes - the best way to keep up with it all is to subscribe to the weekly digest of posts over there, so you get an email every Saturday with links to everything from that week.

While at the beach I sent the members a note telling them what we were up to - I don’t like to think of it as gatekeeping, but some things are more personal than social media or a broadcast medium like this, and so Members get more intimate snapshots of what’s going on, process, and struggle.

Membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. It also makes possible things like the gift links in this issue. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, and generous discounts, among other perks.

Thank You!

If you have read this far - you are amazing. I hope you have a great weekend, and all your dreams come true.

Till next time,

HH

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