Adam's eyes

This morning Adam and I were out looking for a certain boat, which we did not find. We did, however, see a boat far off in the fog, about a mile away. I couldn't tell whether it was going upriver or down. This is  the photo that I took to get an idea which way it was going. This is cropped and magnified here. It was just a blur on my camera's screen.

Adam, though, took a look and decided it was going upriver. As it turns out, he was right. I've learned to trust his eyesight. He can stand on one side of the Big Sandy River and spot a heron in the woods on the other side. He can look down the river a mile into the sunset and give an accurate guess which company built a boat that I can barely see.

When I was his age, my eyes were already going bad. But his eyesight is something I envy. If he got a job on a boat, the pilot could turn off the radar.

Contrast in Catlettsburg

One of my favorite spots along the Ohio River is Virginia Point Park at Kenova, W.Va., where the Big Sandy River empties into the Ohio. Whenever I go to the park, this usually catches my eye as I look across the Big Sandy at Catlettsburg, Ky.

Every time I look at this scene, I think of how the idea of community has changed in my lifetime. The church steeple to me represents people in a geographic area gathering at one spot. It could be a church, a country store, a park or a similar place. Now, kids communicate through their cell phones, and a lot of us adults form communities with people we might never meet face-to-face through the Internet.

But you know, the new reinforces the old, too. There are a lot of people I knew once who have moved away, and I can keep in touch with them thanks to social networking sites such as Facebook. So it's not so much of an old vs. new as you might think.