Word of the Week - 120

Big Sur Coast, photo by Vern Clevenger.

Word of the Week:  NEPENTHE

The start of no other season transports me to earlier times in the same manner as summer.  As Los Angeles began to swelter on Saturday, my thoughts drifted to an A&W Root Beer drive-in, oasis in Paso Robles on the vacation road back to the coast.  On Sunday, when our little town was 103 at about 12:30, I recalled Nepenthe's deck above the Big Sur cliffs, our first Ambrosia Burgers with pink lemonade.  I also remembered our dad telling us the meaning of "nepenthe," an ancient remedy for banishing grief, sorrow or trouble by inducing forgetfulness.

I have not gone to check my archives but suspect I write nearly the same post every year.  Summer's hold on me is that tenacious and I always capitulate to its fierce, mad strength.  Not to mention its ability to cloud memory.

So much to contain, all those summers, how is there room for other matters?  Once I allow myself, there are multiple reveries over the light, the clothes, the movies, family vacations, Girl Scout adventures, crafts, weekly treks to the library, our series of wading pools and, best of all, free time, its own source of forgetfulness of the homework and autumn yard chores not too far distant.  Until then, my sister and brother and I could count on at least one family trip that took us eventually to the sea and included restaurant meals.  Pancake houses, Fisherman's Wharf, small town diners, even unfamiliar grocery stores that sold much better stuff than ours did.

More than a time of year, summer is a state of mind, one to which I happily return when prompted by changes subtle or brash.  There may yet be days of our June gloom (which does not require banishing), the cooler nights, less fire-prone conditions.  I suppose each of the seasons has a trickster aspect, leading us to expect its best and frequently getting conditions far different.  While there are odes to every time of the year, I think summer has the edge on endurable.  We can talk about rock and roll another time.

The swimsuit issue

Polka Dot Swimsuit by T.S.Harris.

Watery Bliss by T.S. Harris.

At the above link, T.S. Harris entices us, or certainly me with a description of influences on her work, paintings of women from another era in lingerie and bathing attire. One of her collections is called "Noir." I cannot help but think of Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, stars and pin-up beauties of the 1940s and 50s, along with the men they chose in the real world and in the movies.

It is the end of summer.  At the high school across from our apartment, school has been in session for more than a week.  During my childhood, we generally went back close to mid-September.  Of course it can be summer in Los Angeles until October when we often have our hottest days and worst fires.

There is something so unambiguous about a bathing suit.  Paintings of women wearing them feel as though the artist has pared away whatever else inhabits the subject's life.  Of course, that is what paintings do, catch and forever hold a moment in time.  The suit is a costume, not everyday attire.  Water is another realm, separate from ordinary time, ordinary pursuits.   I think of astronauts, of space walks, of leaving the familiar effects of gravity and terra firma for a cool and weightless world from which one returns reluctantly.

 For periods of my life when I've had regular use of a pool, I've been aware that there is a re-entry factor to leaving the water, consciously making an adjustment to the natural laws of land, its responsibilities, expectations.  Even in retirement, summer is another country.  A lifetime of having these month represent greater freedom, more choices, more ways to step beyond our everyday selves is not easily forgotten or surrendered.  No wonder most of us hold onto summer with both hands, even though we suffer the heat and long for the cool mornings to come.  Summer is youth and a bit of make-believe.  Winter comes soon enough.  Will anyone be surprised if we prefer to hang out here as long as we can?

Painting by Milton Avery.

Painting by Amanda Blake.

Painting by Jeff Hein.

Art by Anna Vaivare.

Painting by Jessica Brilli.

Small, or perhaps not-so-small, pleasures

Words are tools and companions.  They do their best to establish some order in the mind, they look swell on the page.  I am a fan.

It was 28 years ago, give or take, that I discovered art rubber stamps.  Images, alphabets, words, quotes.  It was 2 1/2 months ago that I discovered the site for rubberstampchamp and for scarcely more than the pennies retrieved from beneath the cushions of our old couch before it was voted out of office, I can order small (they also make LARGE) custom rubber stamps of words I would not find on the open market.  The link, by the way, is to the rubberstampchamp page for custom hand stamps, where prices start as low as $3.25 for a 1/2" square stamp.  Yesterday I ordered one that size, 2 lines, that says Thank You.  Nice and tiny.  Do not underestimate the usefulness of a tiny cluster of words.  Earlier I ordered a 1/2" image of my crocodile puppet drawing, shrunken yet defined, with my initials. to use as a logo.  In addition to stamps that cost less than candy at the movies, at rubberstampchamp, shipping is free on orders of $10 or more.  I ask you!

Expected to arrive with the wee square Thank You are a caption for one of my rubber stamp figures and a quote I wrote about this week, "be vast and brilliant" which can be a caption for the new sun postcard I will order before the sale ends tomorrow.  Among my two new and most favorite things, ordering Vistaprint postcards made with some of my art and dreaming up rubber stamps I never thought I could possess for less than $4 apiece.  Other recent, nourishing pleasures include the discovery of new-to-me artists, Pinterest most of the time and summer, simple and free, summer. My son proclaimed years ago, when we used to, for reasons now murky, watch Dawson's Creek, that he didn't believe in the existence of "guilty" pleasures but rather, just pleasures.  I could pretend that we were visionaries, capable of knowing the break-put potential of Michelle Williams or, even more surprising after the train wreck that was Pacey, Joshua Jackson in Fringe, but the truth is we like what we like, no explanations, no apologies.  So while there may not be guilty pleasures, I do believe there might small ones, joys that cost little or no money, that are available to all or nearly all of us.  Or no, this may actually make them enormous pleasures.  Foolish woman and her foolish semantics.  Pleasures make us happy, may actually alter our chemistry (if happiness is the opposite of abuse).  Whatever summer remains where you are, be greedy, grab it by the handful.  I'm glad the cherries and blueberries were so delicious and frequently affordable this year.  If only they could be year-round products at discount prices, all orders over $10 shipped free.

Word of the Week - 19

Art by Joseph Mugnaini, illustrator of many Ray Bradbury stories.

Word of the Week: SUMMER

The wide, free days of childhood summers glow with their own light.  The sun rides higher in the sky, convincing us that sleeping in is a wasteful act, for who would choose to miss the hours of deep morning shadows, the long-absent joy of shorts?

Reading and summer remain forever paired, beginning with a weekly stack of picture books from the library, evolving to whatever we wished to sample from the family bookshelves.  It was the season in which I discovered Carson McCullers and for years re-read southern writers then, aligning myself with the heat from their fiction.  The temperature also matched tales from Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man."

"Prologue

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks' walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky."

"...Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned down over his thick wrists. Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt."

"...The pictures were moving, each in its turn, each for a brief minute or two. There in the moonlight, with the tiny tinkling thoughts and the distant sea voices, it seemed, each little drama was enacted. Whether it took an hour or three hours for the dramas to finish, it would be hard to say. I only know that I lay fascinated and did not move while the stars wheeled in the sky."

I doubt if statistics support my belief that there exists a time of year in which imagination grows richer, sprouts, then broadcasts its seeds which take root and repeat the process.  Space and time, two Bradbury themes, describe summer as I knew it in childhood, as I know it now in retirement.  I give thanks for the luxury of a wandering mind, never lost but now able to poke along unexplored paths I had to pass up when real life held me more rigidly in its grip. 

 

 

Under the morning sun in Billington's Cove

As The Reading Man awoke on that summer Wednesday, he remembered dreaming of conversations with goldfish.  He must have been under water, for they, plural, swam right up to his face, their mouths opened and closed and they spoke, in English, to him in clear tones unmuffled by water or any assumed lack of familiarity with talking.  What they discussed he could not recall.

With their glowing hues still bright in his interior vision, he opened his eyes to the unaccustomed brightness of a Billington's Cove morning.  As it had some weeks earlier, sun somehow managed to overcome the tradition of fog and damp that made The Cove such a destination for those fleeing the valley heat.  In a shade he knew intimately, stripes and pools of egg yolk yellow inched across his bed, the floor, the walls.  My favorite color, he thought before he took in the significance of this meteorological transformation.  The first warm spell introduced him to communal outdoor movies.  If the tales were true, this one might signal - did he dare to hope? - a town-wide dance.  A dance.

Original art and glowing eggy goodness by Jennifer Bellinger.  Thank you.

He said "thank you" out loud to a universe whose nearest-to-Earth star had altered his vision of the day.  Never one to dawdle when there were places to be, he reached Gloria's as though he was two men, twins perhaps, one who was quicker and more eager than the second, one who believed this was a race he had to win.  He left his imagined, slower self in the dust.

Taking the path to the kitchen door, Mr. Apotienne, at the same time, kept watch on the light-capped sea, coaxing, encouraging it, silently pleading his case for clear skies and off-shore winds.  These were wizardly doings he thought, knowing fully that areas of high pressure and low pressure altered the weather patterns.  It only seemed like magic.

As he stepped onto the small porch, Gloria opened the door.  "What does this signify?" he asked, hands indicating everything within view which had begun to grow toasty as the temperature rose.  "And whatever it brings, will you go with me?"  Gloria, laughing, said she was just about to extend the same invitation to him.  Knowing he'd understand the West Side Story reference, she told him, "There'll be a dance tonight at the gym."  Not a gym, probably a field or cordoned-off street, but a dance all the same.  He was twins again, this time one a sweaty-palmed teen, the other a slightly-less-sweaty palmed man of advanced years but one who was pretty sure he could dance to anything they played.

Previews of Coming Attractions in Billington's Cove

So help me, I will do my best to have a blog post - Gloria and anything else that demands attention - tomorrow. Meanwhile, two images to ponder.