just a time from now

Two in one

( fifty questions meme )


( once a livingroom...now an office )


( once an office...now a workroom, this room went from photo One to photo Three in seven days, from one Saturday to the next )

This took sooooooooooo much longer than it should have...geez!!

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

quiltedlives suggested green which, when asked, is my response as my favorite color...sage green. But as I think about green, I realize it is, for me, a background color, the color that sets-off or surrounds other colors and, for me, a little hard to do without coming across as cliche. I takes my chances and this time, I'm mainly doing impressions, memories, the not tangible, with just a couple of actual tangibles thrown in for balance.

1) Green reminds me of driving Interstate Highway 5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco (also the other way around) because for most of the 6, 7, 8 hour trip, depending on traffic and speed, you are surrounded by the softly rolling pale green hills of central California and with one person or another, I've done that drive several dozen times.

2) Our kitchen has gray-green counters, as close to sage as we could come, which Lauren chose and which beautifully set-off the redwood cabinets.

3) My mom's, mine, and Lauren's eyes, which vary from yellow-green (mom's were) to pale green (mine are) to blue-green (Lauren's are).

4) When I think of my parents, they are surround mainly by warm colors having lived mostly at the beach or in the desert but green is also always present because where ever they lived, there was always a golf course close by. In fact, for the last twenty years for my mom and thirty for my dad, the desert golf course was right outside their front door. Watered from underground wells, it was almost always kept green.

5) The felt green of our family room pool table when I was growing up in LA, reminds me of my grandpa who was a wonderful player.

6) The dull green of the wind-swept junipers when driving the Pacific Coast Highway on one side with the sparkling blue of the Pacific on the other.

7) I keep seeing in my mind Central Park so I'll include it along with Golden Gate Park, Balboa Park (San Diego) and a little now-nameless-to-me park in LA where Daiv and I would go frequently when we were very young, where we would climb to the top of the little hill and where, hidden among the trees, he would read me Shakespeare.

8) I'm wearing my comfy pants as I write, which are a sage-green plaid, with tiny dashes of blue and narrow stripes of cream, flannel and which are my favorites.

OMG only two more!!

9) Salzburg, Austria and why? My two friends and I had been travelleing for about a 1 & 1/2 months and were starting to get tired. We came into Salzburg on the train late and with no idea where to go, the hostels were filled when, from out of nowhere, a woman arrives IN A CAR!!  and asks if we needed a place to stay. Uhmmm...hell yes. We pile into the little European Ford and she drives us to the top of a hill where she and her husband have like a compound for the weary traveler. I walked into our semi-private room, just us 3, I walked to the window and I looked out over the most beautiful GREEN landscape I'd ever seen. It looked like a great huge golf course in my mind, so clean, so almost precise. Understand, in Munich, we'd spent 3 nights in a circus tent, located in a dirt field with I don't even know how many other people (another story for another time) so Salzburg really was a little bit like a green heaven.

10) MONEY!!! NO, wait, not money because that would be wrong, right? Just me being crass or shallow or trivial. Except, I have to go get Lauren and I've spent the better part of my day doing these two little Color Memes so, yeah...MONEY!!! American money anyway and at least for the time being as every day our bills seem to be getting more and more colorful. But for today anyway...MONEY!!!

I iz DONE!!!

I haven't done a meme since July of 2009, so...

[A]- AVAILABLE: No

[B]- BIRTHDAY: a non-day as my birthday is New Years Eve, the world celebrates, I've learned just to stand back and let it, not to intrude

[C] - CRUSHING?: Hummm…sure

[D] - DRINK YOU LAST HAD: Coffee

[E] - EASIEST PERSON TO TALK TO: My daughter, Lauren

[F] - FAVORITE MUSIC GROUP/BAND: Karen Marie Garrett, Jeff Oster etc. (instrumental music)

[G] - GUMMY BEARS OR GUMMY WORMS: Neither

[H] – HOMETOWN: I was born in San Bernardino, southern CA but never lived there. We lived in San Diego until I was 9. My father was ‘drafted’ by NASA so we moved to a suburb of Long Beach called Lakewood for 1 year (apartment)  then we moved to Hacienda Heights (house) in eastern San Gabriel Valley. When I moved from there I was on my own. I don’t call any my hometown, not really.

[I] - INSTRUMENT(s): None

[J] - JUICE: V-8, guava,

[K] - KILLED SOMEONE: No

[L] - LONGEST CAR RIDE: as a one-shot - Vegas to San Jose but my father liked driving trips so, two weeks out of every summer, we drove everywhere in the west.

[M] - MILKSHAKE FLAVOUR: Chocolate

[N] - NUMBER OF SIBLINGS: None

[O] - ONE WISH: that my family and I move  in NYC within the next 5 years, Lauren for school (under grad – post grad whatever at Columbia) and us for the rest of our lives.

[P] - PERSON WHO CALLED YOU LAST: Daiv

[R] - REASONS TO SMILE TODAY: (and tomorrow and tomorrow and...) Lauren and me and summer

[S] - SONG YOU LAST HEARD: Radiohead’s Reckoner

[T] - TIME YOU WOKE UP: 6am

[U] - UNDERWEAR: black whatever

[V] - VEGETABLE(S): salads (feta, dried cranberries, pecans), corn-on-the-cob, broccoli florets dipped in some creamy dressing

[W] - WORST HABIT: imagining my life as something other but not actually doing anything to make it other, I daydream too much

[X] - X-RAYS YOU'VE HAD: dental, mammogram

[Y] - YOUR FAVORITE ANIMAL: anything small and pretty and unexcitable with fur
 
[Z] - ZODIAC SIGN: Capricorn

probably should have put this behind a cut but it's okay this way...yeah?

I had hoped in this post to wax poetic about the rain we were supposed to get today but since the downpour only lasted about five seconds, I've decided to talk about my family instead since I haven't and probably should.

After a lovely, quiet day spent as I wanted since both of them were away -- school, work --  I then brought Lauren home and we were finally able to spend some time going though her recent photographs in order to get a few ready for me to post, along with mine, to the 100_snapshots  comm. Our first post!!! I don't know if they allow dual-posters but I'll undoubtedly find out soon enough.

She had me sit behind her while she worked, I read  mostly, so she could ask questions when necessary and she diligently went through them all resizing them, cropping them if necessary and in a few cases adjusting the color slightly. The comm. only allows minimal adjustments. She was very sure of what she wanted to do, how she ultimately wanted the photographs to look and I was pleased to see that, in my opinion, she had a very good eye. I'm trying to influence her as little as possible both when she takes the photos and also when she crops them and such so they really are a reflection of her.

A moment that made my heart proud was when, while looking at one of hers, she turned to me and said, 'I'm telling you, that looks like a Rauschenberg' and she smiled. And man, so did I.

Once I post to the comm. I'll link to my journal, or maybe the other way around, and you can let us know what you think.

She then joined me out in the courtyard with her laptop while I continued reading. My routine is computer stuff until Daiv comes home, and then reading. It was lovely out, sunny and just slightly breezy, bright blue skies, filmy clouds, that whole thing. I had taken the guinea pig, Tristan, out there much earlier in the day and it was nice to remember how the day had progressed since.

Daiv did a barbeque so there were only a few dishes to rinse and put in the dishwasher and then we watched a history channel sort of documentary on Alexander the Great. I would like to imagine Alexander really looked as pretty as they made him in the show but I doubt it.

Now Lauren's in her room no doubt playing on her computer or maybe bouncing off the walls from the sound of it, Daiv's rummaging through the pantry searching out the cookies to munch on while he decompresses from his day -- he had a major presentation this morning -- in front of the TV, and I'm in the bedroom listening to music and doing this meme. After this, I'll check email, read for awhile, and then to bed. Tomorrow's Saturday and we can sleep in. Right now, we're all here, we're all healthy, and we're all safe.

Sweet. And yeah, she's definitely bouncing off the walls, no doubt about it.

The neighborhood where I live was working-class when these houses were built back in 1961. They are well-built but unimaginatively-designed little ranches that came without sprinkler systems. Some have installed them, some, including us, haven't. There is a frontyard, courtyart and backyard none of which had ANY plantings when we moved in. The backyard has a lovely deck that came with the house and a gazebo my husband added. Otherwise, it's basically wild California grass Interspersed with weeds. The frontyard is vaguely okay, there's juniper and Lily of the Valley and at least I keep it weeded and the little bits along the driveway and the street are nice.

So now we come to the Happiness part...my courtyard. When we moved in it had a stockade fence which we removed and David built a sweet little craftsmen-esque one instead. The courtyard itself was dirt...just dirt. I was out there early this morning pruning, weeding, but not watering, that comes only in the evening, when I realized it was what I wanted to post about today. There's hawthorn, nandina, juniper, a flowering plum, and others whose names I've forgotten. Working there until it got to hot to do so any longer, made me happy. Every plant there, I planted. Every plant, every tree, well..every...everything. And all is watered by hand.

See. The view would be from outside our front door. Click-click for larger.