The humble ziplock

So you like to sit around and doodle.  Here's a new possibility.  Permanent marking pens. 

Packaging for small Christmas gifts, holiday mail (as long as they can read an address and you have the correct postage).  Fresh.  Inspiring.  Neat.  Easy.

Source: suziebeezie.tumblr.com via Lisa on

Be

Or just be.

Reason to Believe

The midnight/morning jukebox selection was "Reason to Believe." I thought when I'd played it a few times, I might know what its message was intended to be. Other than the abundantly obvious, there seems no answer. We are all adrift in time and space, trying to shuffle pain into the airlock, hoping for passengers to keep us company and help defray costs.
Details of the much too short life of Tim Hardin, including artists who covered his songs.  Among them, Nico, on her debut album.


Another version, referred to on YouTube under the Tim Hardin video, from the Youngbloods.  And group leader, Jesse Colin Young, whose face still says 1970s to me as almost no other can.  Can't explain it, don't need to.

The pencil

The ever-informative, often surprising CBS Sunday Morning show this weekend paid homage to the #2 pencil.  The segment began with David Rees, author of HOW TO SHARPEN PENCILS with footage of him at work on this arcane (to some of us) art form.  For more, visit here.  Once again, I realize I have been doing IT all wrong.

Ordering information here.

Should you still have questions, Pencil Revolution can likely answer them all.

Melba and the babysitter

Art dolls by Laurie Johnson.

In another of those previous lifetimes to which I refer, I had a business making stocking-faced dolls.  As I was getting started, developing patterns and models, my sister and I sat and sewed together.  She created the pair shown here, gumball-headed Melba and her babysitter.  They have been with me for nearly 40 years and grow more dear with age. Their gowns are made from scraps, the babysitter's hair a doll product from the 1970s, a few inches from a lengthy hank of curly mohair.  Bits of exhausted pantyhose, stuffed with polyester fiberfill, are heads and hands.  Real blush colors the cheeks.  The same doll-making supply house that carried the mohair also sold the narrow double-faced satin ribbon.

I believe passionately in the right we each have to choose our path, no matter how far it may carry us from a rational course.  Who is to define rational?  We are drawn toward that which exerts itself upon us, away from that with the weaker gravitational pull.  Even to try and insinuate our notions of a right trajectory on anyone else is arrogant, demeaning.   We cannot possibly know the terrible price someone has paid just to be where they are, just to be.   Without that wisdom, how can we correct or condemn their actions.  We each reside in the center of a unique universe, bombarded by media-invented images of success and contentment, often questioning why we must take such adaptive, evasive, circuitous steps to approach a version of peace.

My sister has found her comfort level in less frequent communication and while I miss what had once been elevated foolishness along with so much shared DNA, I can only support her choice.   As I think of everything and everyone I have known that no longer fits me any better than those size 8 1/2 Calvin Klein rosy metallic flats, I wrap my imposed estrangement up in a mental flannel blanket, ends tucked around tight to keep the baby from feeling unsafe in life's drafty expanse.  For decades the babysitter has kept watch over the sturdy and cheerful-seeming Melba, knowing at times that bravado and idiocyncrasies are all that keep us tethered.  Whatever it takes.

Peter Rabbit remembers

Sorting through a kitchen cupboard I came upon this,

part of a two-piece set of Beatrix Potter Wedgewood given upon the birth of my son.  The friend from whom he received it has been gone just short of 10 years.  Such a plate is by now, I imagine, considered a collectible. [Mentioning a Thanksgiving table with a Lazy Susan in a recent writing assignment, I was assured that Lazy Susans are now definitely in the collectible category, extinct as hoop skirts.]

If I can weave them together, the pieces that took form as I looked at the dish seem to be about comfort, simple acts of human kindness that make a difference; about what endures - in friendships, in iconic or treasured objects, in memories, in tradition; about the swiftness and brevity of it all.

I see Jane, bestower of Beatrix Potter, helping me paint an iron bedstead on our porch in Sierra Madre Canyon, steps away from her house.  I see and hear her chuckling at Ratso, my vintage rabbit fur coat, one of many hippie-esque remnants that seeped into the 1970s.  She was not one to offer the sip of camomile tea, her comfort took other forms.  Freelance assignments, enticing me away from a state of semi-exile (with low rent and great weather) to a real writing job and the unrealized promise of an assistant back in my hometown, unequaled generosity and fine humor.  She could not have been called sentimental or mushy.

Without checking the date, I would not have realized how long ago Jane died.  With my imperfect memory, I'm not sure if I've written about her in other years.  I do know any mentions would not have included the Peter Rabbit illustration.  I may have missed the mark, trying to find a point in all this.  The closest I can come is to note we are reminded that forward is really the only direction, persevering is the indicated action, holding on, sometimes lightly, but holding on nonetheless may keep up from drifting too far off course, our anchors as fragile as memories or photographs or a child's china plate.

If Wes Anderson ran the world, with help from BoBo BaBushka

For Rebecca

Characters from four Wes Anderson films, as interpreted by artist BoBo BaBushka.
The very last set of MOONRISE KINGDOM dolls is available, at least for today, at
the Pygmy Hippo Shoppe in Los Angeles.