a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Wood with a gift for burning

 


Frank Harmon draws and writes this morning about the cold we've had...alligators in the east freezing, children skating on creeks not known for freezing over, and birds going about what birds do, even in this chill.  He is inside with a wood fire burning, about which, he notes, the climate people are confused whether that is environmentally good or bad.  I wrote back to him what first came to mind, and then decided to share it here:

"A wood fire burning in the fireplace.  Warmth of body and soul.  Wish I had one here, too.  Graduate students living in a farm house way out in the country halfway to Pittsboro, we had three fireplaces, one in each downstairs room.  The cozy front room where we built the bookshelves was my favorite.  I burned old wood all winter and sometimes into the spring, and read there."

Do you know that poem by Adrienne Rich, I asked him, and now ask you, about the difference between being lonely and being alone? It's called "Song"; I listen to it often these days.  That last stanza,

If I'm lonely/ it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore/ in the last red light of the year/ that knows what it is, that knows it's neither/ ice nor mud nor winter light/ but wood, with a gift for burning.

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Movie nights and days

 


I've been waking up earlier and earlier these days, my head full of ideas of things to do, changes to be made, better ways of thinking and acting.  January, my Capricorn month, has always been the time of energy mode...papers, shelves, closets and fixit house projects, yard projects, life patterns.  If by February some of those are unfinished, they mostly languish for another 11 months.  But in January, it's amazing what things get done, morning by morning, concept to completion.  Note, however, that "morning by morning" doesn't include much past the second hour of afternoon.  No matter the month, I slump by then.

Waking today, my first thought was to make a list of the movies I watch after that  witching hour when I can do no more...or, more positively put, during those later knitting and tea hours, especially on these cold and (like today) rainy days when a walk is out of the question.  


Except one or two, these won't probably be found on a Golden Globe list.  A lot are quirky, more are lighter than air.  And, also with a few exceptions, the ones I most watch were made before 1950.

I could be defensive and say that I don't watch film the way other people do, but there's no reason to be defensive.  I just don't.

So here they are, stories empty of car chases, guns blazing, cities blown up, mean men acting out political hubris in war and business, and strange creatures with molten heads running the world.  These are watch-in-winter films, in no particular order of importance, except the first.


1. I Know Where I'm Going, with Wendy Hiller (she wasn't Dame yet).   It didn't take me half a second to begin with her.  Set in Scotland during the war, the film has a lot to say about a country's home pride and those who muscle their way into it.

2. The Young in Heart, with Billie Burke and Paulette Goddard. Billie Burke has been a movie idol of mine since, as a teenager, I borrowed a book from the library on her life.  She dated Enrico Caruso, but married Florenz Ziegfield and said she got up every morning before he did, so she could do her hair and put on her makeup.  The next ones won't be a surprise.


3.  Dinner at Eight, B.B. again, with two other comediennes you won't regret watching strut their stuff:  a comedy, with tragedy woven in, it is one of those movies made of a showy extravagance, when people went to see films that for little over an hour could relieve their minds of their economic reality.

4. Merrily We Live, with B.B. and Constance Bennet.  No tragedy in this one. Only slapstick, or what you will recognize as "screwball comedies", with butler.  

4a. My Man Godfrey, in which William Powell deals with Carol Lombard over an ash heap he's living in and becomes their butler.  Don't bother with the one made after 1950.  Lots of re-done film after that time just didn't come up to the original, no matter who got to play in them.

5. Grand Hotel, with some of the same actors from #3 and the brilliant addition of Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.  Plenty of tragedy and also redemption.

6. Dancing Lady, speaking of Joan Crawford.  Yes, she really can dance as well as be dramatic.

7. Good Girls Go To Paris, with the wonderful Joan Blondell being her spunky self.


7b. The Stand-In, where Joan Blondell makes her mark again, this time with Leslie Howard on a movie set. Humphrey Bogart is in it, but I watch it for those two.

8. The Animal Kingdom, Leslie Howard here too, with Ann Harding and Myrna Loy (from the Thin Man series, though she plays a very different woman in this).

9. Sin Takes A Holiday, another Constance Bennett...a very old one, in which her diction is quite mannered...not sure who directed her that way, but you can ignore that lapse, and enjoy her weird situation.


10. If Only You Could Cook, with Jean Arthur and a gang of gangsters who save the day.



11, 11a, 11b. You Can't Take It With You, Easy Living, and The More The Merrier...all with Jean Arthur and a full cast of famous people from those other movies above, doing silly, sometimes inspiring things.  If you like movies with seduction scenes, there is nothing better than the one in TMTMEasy Living, on the other hand, will have you turning to your calculator.

12. The Rage of Paris, with Helen Broderick, a character actress I'd follow in any film, and also Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. from #2, bringing his comic charm.

,

13. Born Yesterday. Judy Holliday had to have won some major prize for that game of gin rummy she plays with Broderick Crawford.

14. The Philadelphia Story, with Katharine Hepburn and all the people famous from that era.  But that's probably on everybody's list.  Never mind.  Instead watch #15.

15. Holiday, with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who's also in #14, but believe it or not, this one's better.  Their acrobatic scene was "borrowed" by Gene Kelly for Singing in the Rain...I spotted that, Gene.

There are lots more old ones in my like box, but in case you think I see only in black and white, I'll put in some newer ones. 

16. The Kindness of Strangers, with Bill Nighy.  Any movie he's in is worth it.  I don't know how I found this one, but I'm glad I did.  He plays a Russian, sort of.

16a. The Last Bus, with Timothy Spall.  He's in Enchanted, too, but you'd never know it by this film, in which he travels with the help of strangers across a country on a very emotional mission.

16b. Finding Your Feet, with three British actors I couldn't live without seeing, including Timothy Spall, who apparently can play anything.  And dance.

16c. Calendar Girls, with all the best British actresses except three, and I'm sorry they're not in it, too.  I would have loved to see what their characters made of themselves in the nude.

17. In Your Dreams.  It's Turkish, and made me want even more to go to Istanbul.  Trouble is, you can't find the film anymore.  All it says is "error" when I try.

18. Still Breathing, set in the King William district of San Antonio, a strange little film, but I like it, and Celeste Holm is in it, and the Alamo.

19.  The House by the Sea. It's in French, but you will recognize the story from old family stuff, I'm sure, no matter who your family is and even if you don't know French.

20. Amour, also in French, a beautifully done, but searing, emotional story we should all watch.

21. Louise en Hiver, about an old woman who is stranded over the winter at a seasonally abandoned beach.  It's a quiet, slow but pointed film about survival, animated in the plain gentle way of children's picture books. 

22. The Women on the Sixth Floor, French again, about class and counter-class with a bemused character who goes between.

22a. The Gilded Cage.  French and Portuguese.  A good story about who we are when we can be who we are outside of who others think we are.

23. Queen to Play, in which Kevin Kline takes second best to Sandrine Bonnaire in the game her character learns.  In French totally.

24.  A Little Game, a charming little New York tale to watch right after #23.

25. A Tuscan Wedding, purely for the fluff and looneyness of it.  It's in Dutch and Italian, believe it or not. "You can smell the Prosecco in the air!" says one of its more pathetic characters.  And she says it twice.  To her dog(s). 

26. Twelfth Night (1996)Yes, Shakespeare, and the best film of that play ever done.  I could watch this every week and not get tired of it.  Bonham Carter and her co-stars take over Shakespeare's language as if it were their own.  Really.

27.  The Elephant and the Butterfly.  Another good story about what we learn from others in childlike ways.  See it along with The Sense of Wonder.  Their titles could easily be interchangable, I'm realizing now.

28. The Farewell, with Awkwafina, who made a serious character out of her own life story, I think.  She's the Golden Globe winner for this.

29. This Beautiful Fantastic, one of my favorite garden rescue films.  Tom Wilkinson is in it.  You might want to pair this one with Greenfingers.

30.  Little Forest, about food and the hunger that drives us to it.  No, it's not a documentary...it's a real story.  But like #17, In Your Dreams, it's hard to find any more.

30a. Tasting Menu.  Delicious all around, though it does have a man or two with doses of hubris.

For the travel-hungry, some armchair-travel films...Perfumes and Haute Cuisine and Food Club and A Five-Star Life and Learning to Drive and The Station Master and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and The Grocer's Son and Border Cafe and Bagdad Cafe and My Afternoon with Margueritte and A Man Called Ove (not the later American version) and the Australian Strictly Ballroom...

That should get me (and you) through the last cold day of March, if we do more than one film on a couple of afternoons and evenings.  Which I often do.

Oh:  Here's one for all you Hallmark fans...Chicklit, where the men in the pub go clear off their gourds so they don't lose their evenings of pints.





Sunday, December 24, 2023

Peace?

 


Dear readers,

One by one, your holiday cards appear in the mailbox. 'Tis the season for enjoying messages from family, old friends and new.  So many of them, like the one above (isn't it beautiful?), wish us peace.  I have sent my own cards out wishing the same.

Peace, though.  What is that? I have begun to wonder.   Certainly, it is one of the traditional words for these holidays...joy, peace, happy.  We all use them.  We hope for that indefinable mood and in a broad gesture we hope it becomes universal.  Becomes us. But, though joy and happy are easily perceived, sensed, defined, peace, it seems to me, remains a figment of our imagination.


The other morning I made a card (yes, sorry, there are still a few left to do) for two friends I haven't seen lately.  I'd begun to collage it out of a variety of small scraps, when, one by one, it became a house with spire and, apparently (my friend Alice noticed it when I showed her), a kind of angel in the rafters.  It named itself:  House where all are warm and dry and fed and at peace with each other.

That is the longest title I've ever given a piece of art, except those very few which have a poem wrapped in or around them. It may have begun to answer for me a greater  meaning of peace. I don't mean the meditative state we try to accomplish in yoga, but the sense that all is well among us...every one of us...the whole world.  It gives wellness a much greater distinction (and spirit and empowering) than simply the icon of an exercise facility.  It is a travesty that the weekly spiritual chant in some religious houses...peace be with you....goes no farther than that moment.


Why can't we get along with each other? we (some of us) ask, naively, you might say.  But peace among us is more than getting along.  It's more than tolerating, or accepting, more than inclusivity, too. It's more than being neighborly, that cozy word. It's even more than kindness.

To engender peace means opening the mind to the deeper sense of who we are, who all of us are.  It needs an opening of the self, really.  There is responsibility at its core (pun intended):  being responsible for one another, being responsive to one another.  Understanding the bridge that connects us.  Peace is bigger than we are.  I am hoping it is not bigger than we can be.

All these holiday cards, while beautiful, are a welcome but fleeting reminder of what, as yet, we have not reached among us.  I thank you for them.


May you begin the new year bringing with you Peace in all its fullness.




Thursday, December 7, 2023

People who matter


Long ago, in one of my too-many board meetings, a new executive director of the non-profit announced that we needed to involve more "people with stature".  I'm sorry, but I can't let a phrase like that go without comment.

I asked him what he meant by stature.  You could count on my neighbor Judy, sitting across the table, to lend her wit to a challenge. "You know," she quipped, "tall people."

The exec, trying not to be annoyed on his first day facing us, explained what /who he valued...wealthy people, primed for recognition, publically known as leaders,  especially in business or the lucrative professions.  But eyebrows were already raised.  This new fellow hadn't quite got it.  People who matter to charities that matter are invested in a physical, can-do, idea way.  They understand from the ground up what that organization needs to serve the people who need support.  Then they go and do it.

Yes, money matters; a network of donors who also understand that is indispensible.  But here around that table were already people you could count on, people with compassion and talent, who opened hands that worked hard, mind and body, and gave generously.  As the exec's eyes went around the table, it was clear that he didn't think we were status enough.  He was used to directing and rubbing shoulders with a room full of big names. (Thankfully, he moved on to a more status place a year or two later.)


I thought about that the other day while I sat in the waiting room of the VA hospital near Asheville where my brother-in-law lay after his heart suddenly failed him.  With me were his brother and wife and his sons...those the doctor had somberly told my sister she should call.  We sat watching for three days as my brother-in-law Jim lifted himself from a heart-stopped 30-minute CPR to three days of worried what now?...and suddenly, on the fourth day, overnight, came back among us.  His own physicians and nurses, excellent caregivers all, are still amazed, as we are, and we are grateful to all of them.



Among the waiters was my sister's sister-in-law, Mary Janine, who with her husband, the patient's younger brother, had flown in from far places.  She sat knitting, cheerfully chatting and keeping us less anxious.  I hadn't seen that couple since my sister's wedding fifty years ago.  But waiting rooms are famous for inviting togetherness, whether you are related or not.

My niece Deanna had also come the first day with homemade soup and crackers and chocolate and tea for all of us; she lived only a few minutes away.  She, too, brought with her a craft she was working on...bags of dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks she was stringing to decorate her house for a holiday spiritual retreat. She told us how much she enjoyed using real, natural things in her life and how important they were to the spirit.  One of her jobs is enticing positive spirit in others.

Eventually, that brought us around to Mary Janine's knitting, and the charity she started nearly 8 years ago to lend support to women whose children were suffering with cancer.


She and her sister began Shrugs through Hugs which provides yarn... beautiful yarn she often dyes herself or searches the world for...to volunteers to make into shawls sent to let those mothers know that someone is with them in spirit.  It doesn't sound like much, but it is a huge comfort, the connection as much as the warmth of their knitted shrugs.


Mary Janine and her sister work hard at not only themselves making the shrugs, sending patterns and materials to other volunteers,  but also knitting other beautiful items to sell at select museum shops and boutiques...that's to raise money to buy more yard for their mothers' project.  


Her creativity made me smile.  Since Newport is her special place, she takes the colors of the famous historic homes for her wares and teaches a little history in those packets she sends out.  On their website, they write:

"The idea for our charity began to take shape during the winter of 2016 in Newport, Rhode Island.   Our love for this wonderful city is reflected in our Newport-inspired yarn and shawl collection.   Postcards from Newport highlight some popular points of interest.  Our Gilded Age yarns and shawls honor the strong women behind the Newport mansions while supporting the brave moms we serve through our mission."


You can find her on  https://hugsthroughshrugs.org and on instagram [#hugsthroughshrugs], where the photos of her work and the places they reach are inspiring.  Over the few days we sat getting to know each other, I listened as she recounted how, in fact, other women inspired and taught her craft, and how hard she works to coordinate knitters and find places to sell her yarn to support those mothers' gifts.


 I'm a terrible knitter, myself; simple knit and purl with maybe a little edging is what I keep to.  But even I would try to make shrugs to send her for those mothers.  You can hear and see her whole heart in it.  And you can also see what it takes them to keep it going.  I call Mary Janine and her sister people who matter.

It may have been dire circumstances that brought us together, but I am grateful for the chance to know yet another person who matters and allows others to matter, too, in the best ways.

And here's Deanna's retreat, in case you need a day of renewal at the end of the year, a chance to invoke the kind of spirit that opens itself, hands and mind, to others' needs while it opens yours.


                                                                                                                                                                            
May hope and dedication light your holidays all, as it will certainly light ours 
as our first candle glows for Chanukah.


















Sunday, November 5, 2023

Book on Books - nota bene, a book adventure


Good morning.  Over the last week, I have been reading Martin Latham's The Bookseller's Tale, enjoying every word...sometimes going back over to catch again names, titles, places, events.  I came to it from another bookseller's book, a slim little volume of small prose and poems called When it slows down, I will do a display, which I'd found browsing around Epilogue downtown while waiting for my coffee.  I like walking up there for just those pastimes...a decent length of walk, a coffee (maybe a Mexican pastry on a cold day), and books new and used.

Anyway, Latham, the author of the Tale, is a clearly well-read, long-time bookseller, now running a Waterstone Books in Canterbury, GB.  Canterbury, in case you have forgotten your sophomore high school reading, is the site of the famous cathedral, to which we owe one of the great "chapter novels" [sorry, all you medievalists out there] in English history:  Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, no slouch when it comes to what we even now look for in books...bravery, one-up-man-ship, false piety, betrayal, sex, foodies, Romance (the capital letter changes the meaning though not the origins) and lessons learned.


Latham's is about books...the way we find them, corner them, collect them, hunt them down, dig them out from moldy basements and back shelves of second-hand stores, attach to them for comfort and sneak them under the covers for excess, read them in corners and attics and libraries, open or closed.  It's about the eccentricity, dedication, dangerous encounters, and savvy saviors among 4,000 years of collectors and hoarders; about discovering and uncovering...like the book-edge paintings or the often  ribald medieval hand-drawn scenes adorning the copies of ancient sacred texts (apparently, the scribes enjoyed bringing bestial delights to higher words).


Before you start yawning, Tale is actually written in quite a witty way, so that the well-researched and discretely arranged information makes you turn every page as if you were reading a novel.  I don't think I've read anything so volunteerily closely since my parsing graduate school days.  

But here's the part I wanted to share with you personally.  Not long into the beginning of Latham's book, he introduces a section called "Comfort Books"...those that, over the years and particularly since childhood, we've read over and over, with an attachment that we may or, more likely, may not, have understood.  In his bookstore to customers, on the street or at coffee shops to strangers, and in conversation with authors and other public people, he asks a question:  What book did you go back to time and again as a child?  And what have you become, perhaps in consequence of it?

I sat up straight at that one.  It's no secret that a lifelong of reading (often with elders discovering me in some dark corner to say, "That's enough reading!  Outside with you!") has led me to my vocation...almost a default one, if truth be told.  But a single book?

Immediately, though, it came to mind.  I couldn't remember title or author, but I did well remember the story about a young girl being taken as an indentured servant in New Amsterdam in the 1600's.  Neither could I count now the number of times I walked to the library to read and re-read it; I must have been 8-10 in those years, so I also knew the book was probably written in the 'thirties or 'forties.

As we do these days, I went online to see what was out there with such a plot.  Nothing.  I eventually recalled that the title was the girl's name and something, and that her name began with J.  Still, nothing.  Even the Library of Congress catalog came up with nothing. (But that's not a surprise...as Latham notes, the L of C had the habit of ignoring, burying or outright rejecting books at various chief librarian's dispositions or Congress' political leanings...you'd be unpleasantly surprised at what's not in our national collection.)


So, I did the far better thing...walked to our public library and found a children's librarian at her desk.  When I presented my bibliographic problem, she brightened up and took up her resources.  "We love this kind of problem!" she claimed as she wrote down a faithful description of the plot I knew.

The next day, an email delivered the collected librarians' finds:  three possible books, of which, she wrote, this first one would likely be it.

This is exactly like the book I remember reading

It began with a J, yes; its plot was mostly what I remembered.  Jonica's Island, by Gladys Malvern, who, when I looked her up found that she had written a number of children's historical novels, well-researched and -written, pointed at middle-elementary school age.  She included a glossary of Dutch terms, too, which she used throughout.  Malvern, I went on to read, had an interesting history herself, in part not unlike some of our heroine Jonica, which I'd have loved to know back then...but I'll leave that off now, for brevity's sake.

I next went to find the book online, thinking it might be fun to have and re-read.  Here I found a giant stumbling block.  It was out of print; there were no new copies, nor were there likely to be, though others of hers had been reprinted (more about that in a minute); any extant copy was running at $500. to 700. on any used-book site, Etsy, Ebay and Amazon.  Exhibit A:

Jonica's Island 

4.5 on Goodreads 61 ratings 99 Want to Read


 Since that amount would buy me a hotel for a week in Istanbul, I passed.  But I dug on, and nearly by accident found a site by a woman whose daytime job was personal tech-helper but whose avocation was re-discovering books and authors she once loved.  She'd found Jonica at some odd place, like a library or yard sale, and realizing that others would like it, too, she copied the whole 200 pages, including the illustrations done by Gladys' sister Corinne, on a PDF file you could simply write and ask her to share.


So I did, and here it came.  I'd rather have had the book in hand, of course...kindle doesn't inspire me, but this woman who saved children's books for strangers to read did.  


What amazed me was not only the forgotten illustrations, which in I'm sure in those early years impressed me as much as the text, but the detailed and carefully laid out historical setting...what became New York Island a century later...and which included openly and clearly the temperment of the Dutch settlers, the pride of their work and harshness of the times, as well as the wealth accrued by some, the hypocritic treatment of others, including Jonica's alcoholic father and his thievery,  the violence of whippings and humiliations of the stock, slave buying and selling (and the ignorant disdain of the Dutch to those they bought), a native massacre and reprising settler wars...all horrors portrayed...even the small pox epidemic and its human costs, as well as both the loyalty and discipline and sturdiness of its people.  I must have read all of those words, and yet clung to the girl's story of poverty, servitude, service, affection, care, loyalty and brave perserverence until the romantic (note low-case r) ending satisfied her fate.  Not quite the Velveteen Rabbit.

So what about this complicated story stayed so close to me in those days?  And how on earth could this one come under Latham's "Comfort" category?  I had to think about this slowly, but a few images came forth:

 First, the Dutch frau's housekeeping, for she was a stickler about her house, with generous meals, elaborately sanded floors, and an attractive, comfortable and useful home for her husband and sons.  Jonica, coming into the household from her sad upbringing, thinks this is paradise no matter how hard the work.  Then all except one of the sons' loyalty and affection for Jonica; though their parents keep her stiffly distant as a servant, the boys each bring or make something homey for her small attic room...even, from the most dandyish of them, the gift of a mirror...quite an extravagence in those days...and treat her as a sister. Soon, the parents, while still wary because of her background, come to admire her considerable skills...she had learned them from her mother who had died and left her with a father who only brought her down in their world by his drinking and is almost her undoing later.  (A nosy, imperious neighbor, by the way, often a villain in novels, is the nemesis.)

Finally, the line that stays with me was the first question the frau asked of her relieved husband as she is recovering, thanks to Jonica's fortitude and care, from small pox, "Are the floors sanded?  The candlesticks polished?"  It made me laugh then and still does.

Gladys and Corinne, each in their way, were geniuses at portraying things as they were, and people as they were.  And portrayed them for children like me.

So, why not reprint this book?  Political correctness might be the easiest answer...there is so much prejudice encapsulated, each small group of people subjugating each other group to suspicion, contempt, derision and expulsion from social contact.  I wish I could say that we had evolved better, but alas I cannot.  The brick walls of the Dutch settlement, the gated community, the pilloring and exclusion, the slavery...it's all still here.  Sadly, maddingly.  The history in this book is a microscopic and yet expansive lesson that school could not teach me.



On my trip to Victoria, I walked through the lovely, peaceful cemetery along the Pacific, and found the monument, newly erected, to the Japanese settlers of the area, who had brought so much culture and citizenship to that place over time...and yet whose graves had been destroyed by their neighbors because they were "enemies" during the 'forties.  Why do we do this to one another, I wondered?  In the midst of beauty, there seems always the pit of our ugliness.

Well, back to Mr. Latham's question...I think I found my answer.  What would be yours?  Do try and remember...it's a lot of fun to figure out, and perhaps yours will not be out of print and favor, like mine.

Happy reading.




Tuesday, October 17, 2023

If only pictures were words...

 


This morning, chilled inside and out, I have been staying under the covers (the top one being a warm alpaca throw my mother gave me decades ago) while I read, do word games, make lists for today...ignoring as long as I can the day's call to get up, get dressed and do something.

There is plenty to do, inside and out...to wit:  this blog and its thousand words waiting to unfold themselves to you...

  • travels to the idyllic Victoria, B.C.     

  • visits with dear friends of my youth     

  • my 78th year at the shore, partly cloudy, with loss   

        
  • the leavings of my Aunt Sadie snuggling into my over-crowded but welcoming house and history       

  • old photographs in a box and an overflowing scrap book that I am struggling to make sense of               

     
  • a painting I've finished which I'm struggling to like (and the next one, sitting empty on the workroom table, so far only a blur of gray-blue cloud);   
  • last night's dream, set of all places at the edge of the North Sea (no picture of that).

But none of those are revealing themselves.  Not that I don't want to write them; it's just...I don't know.  When I finally open my laptop, nothing but this word-wandering seems to ensue.

Last night I half repaired the arms of a wing chair I've had since the late '70's and don't want to give up.  I'm attached to that chair, one of the first pieces of furniture bought for our very first house.  The boys were toddling around the San Pedro store, climbing  over sofas and under tables while we chose this one.


But mostly I keep it because it's comfortable and has, no matter what house I have lived in, found its perfect place somewhere...living room, bedroom, study, whatever.  It's stood now for a few years on the corner of Front and Porch; under it is a small stool Mr. Bailey, the woodworker from West Virginia, made.  I can slip into it and watch the whole house from this corner.  And the birds in its fabric, flying among the most unlikely floral pattern, center me.

Alexander, I notice, also makes for it when he comes over, first opening the glass cabinet where I keep my black wedding glassware (see cabinet above), and choosing one for his juice cube concoction, then settling down to unlock his words.  He's coming over tonight to stay while his dad goes to a concert.  


He's growing up, and has less time for after-school visits now.  I run out to catch a quick hug from him as he gets off the bus in front of the house.  Friday nights, when they are free, they come for dinner. While I see him with pleasure as he matures, I think that there is also a kind of grief to growing.  It's Fall, besides, the season of rue and sorrow.  Maybe that's it.  The cold feet in my dream would seem to point to that.


But to return to blogdom:  If only pictures were words, you'd already have read all those subjects listed above, one at a time, in order.  

Alas, order doesn't seem to be the order of the day these days.