John Wise

My great aunt, Ann Burns (née Knezetic), was not an easy woman to photograph and was the embodiment of the phrase, “Get outta here you’s guys with your pictures.” She liked having her picture taken as much as my uncle liked others paying the bill at a restaurant. Still, we need memories of our families that will outlive them, and for me, my aunt will forever be the woman who couldn’t pass up a bargain at the store, kept things for way too long, got her hair done the same way for decades, and never once did I see her wearing closed toe shoes. More than all of that, she was a tough woman who never quit.

This post has been modified in 2023 due to sloppiness in my blogging habits back when I started this thing; as I said at the beginning of this series of days, I’m now rectifying my mistakes. So why am I including wet grass in this post? It’s because I’ve got nothing else, and I like the way the water drops sit on the leaves here at the park we were visiting.

A part of the routine of visiting my family in Santa Barbara is going to the local park to walk the dog. On any given day, a number of local dogs make their appearance, stopping by for a rub and a scratch from my aunt and uncle, who are quite accommodating. This Dalmatian above is Rosie. I don’t see her often, but on occasion, this gentle, easy-going dog slowly makes her way over for a moment of attention. Today, her biggest interest was getting up close and personal with my great-aunt.

This is my great uncle Woody Burns, my hero and one of my greatest mentors. This man landed on Omaha Beach during World War II and marched across France to Germany, then back to Belgium to participate in the Battle of the Bulge and lived to share his story. Over time, we learned of him being hit by a train in Buffalo, New York, when he was eight years old. While in Europe at war, a grenade went off in his foxhole. The concussion tossed him just above the surface, where he remembered looking around and realizing this was not a place he wanted to be. When he fell back into the foxhole, the man next to him was dead. He felt that he had cheated death and it wouldn’t be the last time. For me, my uncle was a mix of Humphry Bogart with a side of James Cagney; he had many jobs and could seemingly do anything in my eyes, and this all came out of an 8th-grade education as that’s as far as he went in school. When he bought his home north of Santa Barbara in Goleta, employers had a difficult time attracting people to live so far away from Los Angeles, where the good jobs were, but something attracted him and my aunt to coastal living, and so this is where they’ve been for nearly 40 years.