When I cross the Georgia state line my brain immediately starts singing, 

“Georgia, Georgia.

"The whole day through

"Just that old sweet song

"Keeps Georgia on my mind.”

 It doesn't matter which direction I’m traveling. From Alabama, Florida, or South Carolina. Bing, like a little silver bell and, "Georgia, Georgia” is queued up.

Stuart Gorrell, a banker, who as far as I know, never wrote another song, wrote the lyrics, and Hoagy Carmichael wrote the tune, but the voice in my head is always Ray Charles.

  So after a little sing-a-long, I asked Ray what I should see in Georgiaand I realized it’s kind of a nonsensical question to ask a blind man.  A dead blind man.      

  Drawings, which is what I’m spending so much of my time and energy on, are pretty single sense dependent. Aren’t they? So where are you going to send me, Ray? And how are you going to show me?

   First we started with some weather at the Lake Seminole Campground. It looked a little threatening but it was time for Dolly’s walk so we went for it.  

Dolly and I had gotten all the way to the other end of the short row of campsites when the threat went from a few warning spits to a deluge in maybe 10 seconds. Not a freezing rain nor a warm rain, but hard, pelting, and wet.

They say a picture's worth a thousand words, but I’m not sure about rain. I’ve drawn fog, dreary lowering days, wet reflecting parking lots, but not a forget-about-it, you’re going to be soaked rain.

Dolly dried herself off on my bed and I headed to the campground shower room with clean dry clothes in a protective canvas sack. By the time I was warmed by the shower, freshly shaved, and in clean dry clothes the rain had stopped. I returned to the van to be greeted by the smell of wet dog. Ray was filling up my senses. My next two drawings featured some dark clouds, a tip of the cap to the weather.

   As we approached Plains a sandy little road off the asphalt had an inviting look so we stopped. I grabbed a  handful of dry roasted peanuts and we had a short walk down the two lane track. As my feet sank slightly I thought that probably neither Ray Charles nor Jimmy Carter had worn shoes in the summer and I remembered what it felt like as a kid to be walking barefoot in warm sand. Dolly was nicely dried out by now.

  While drawing this country scene I heard a couple of gunshots. Having started my travels in November I’ve seen and heard a lot of hunters. It’s the time of year, part of the punctuation of the season in the country. About an hour later a white pick up came out through the fields and as they made their way around me the tail gate was down and there was a doe in the back.

  I hunted as a teenager and I still fish. But the small herd of six deer that share the golf course with me on summer mornings as I mow have softened my heart to those creatures and I’d rather see them alive and lively than dead. As long as they stay off the greens.

  John Steinbeck in his Travels With Charlie carried a rack of guns in his camper more as camouflage than as protection. A man just driving around aimlessly was a bit suspicious, but if you had a rack of guns you were okay. Just out hunting.

   When I got to Plains I found it to be a perfect little country town. It wasn’t tarted up like many of the places I’ve driven through and it wasn’t shabby, either. The high school that Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter went to is now a museum. Not really a museum about Jimmy Carter, but about what it was like to grow up in rural Georgia and go to school there in mid-20th Century America.

  Ray’s experience would have been different in segregated Florida — starting at a school for the deaf and blind at seven where he obviously learned a lot about music.

As different as their schooling was, they both made it to the big time. And they probably would have shared many of the same sensuous memories while getting there. And those senses shaped their work.

  My senses had been put on alert by thinking about Ray Charles and singing the Georgia anthem. I had felt the rain, the cold, the give of the sand, heard gunshots, and I even tasted a peanut while I made a drawing in Plains. I’m not sure how much of it shows up in the drawing, but it must be there.  I hope it’s there. 

  “Like moonlight through the pines”