Simplify, Simplify…

Novelist Dorothy Sayers’ most well-known character, the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, is welcome to his opinion that “a facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought”, but he’ll not dissuade me from my fondness for quotations. I collect pithy selections from other writers’ work and correspondence with an enthusiasm usually reserved for baseball card traders or fans of architectural remnants. I’ve always found a good quotation focuses my attention, helping to make another person’s wit or wisdom accessible in new and useful ways.

Like any collector, I enjoy showing off my treasures. A few of my favorites are posted here. Occasionally I pass along tidbits I find especially piquant or amusing via Twitter, but most of the time I go old-school, taping current favorites to the bottom of my computer monitor. Rarely inspirational in any traditional sense, these hand-written snippets are meant to provide the kind of wacky encouragement and perspective I find stimulating.

They change frequently and vary according to the nature of my current frustration. Only one has earned the privilege of continuous posting, a friend’s utterly perfect description of our beloved computers as “infernal persnickety time-suckers”.  Taken separately, each word is apt. Taken together, they bubble up into a perfect verbal storm that never fails to make me laugh, even as it washes my mind clean of whatever cyber-frustrations have built up around my desk.

Shaping the Gift of Reality

Long before encountering a palm tree, years before skimming across watery ribbons of lapis and azure entwined through the heart of Caribbean islands, lifetimes before walking entangled and thorned into tumbles of bougainvillea and the shadows of tropical dreams, I loved Winslow Homer and his art.

A prolific and engaging American watercolorist, Homer (1836-1910) moved from New York to Prout’s Neck, Maine in the summer of 1883. Despite his love of the New England coast, he often vacationed in Florida and the Caribbean. His mastery of his medium and his unique vision of the islands produced exquisite renderings of sun-drenched homes, palm-fringed beaches and great, vivid falls of blossoms redolent of nutmeg and honey.

During a first visit to the Caribbean, I was intrigued to discover how completely its marvelous realities entangled themselves in my mind with Winslow’s work. It seemed impossible to separate the threads. I had expected to think, “Winslow Homer’s painting looks like this.” But as I gazed about, wriggling my toes into sugar-soft sand and tasting the salt-heavy air, I came to a rather different conclusion. The Caribbean looked liked Winslow Homer. It was as though the artist himself had absorbed, intensified, and re-presented the sea, sand and sky in such a way that his paintings were distillations of the islands – purer than reality itself.

A Taste of Pimento Prose

Edging as I am past middle-age, I take my Saturday nights slow and easy. Content to enjoy occasional dinners with friends, a bluegrass concert or a book, I prefer weekends to be relaxed and spontaneous, an approach that differs considerably from the more disciplined social routine of my parents.

In our long-ago household, Friday night meant dining out, often at the Masonic Lodge, where dinner was followed by music and dancing to a live band. Sunday night was set aside for television – the news program See It Now, then Disney and Kraft Television Theater. 

But if Friday and Sunday nights were for family, Saturday was reserved for my parents and their bridge club. The games rotated from home to home, with the first cards shuffled at 7:00 p.m.  The game ended at 10:00 p.m., or as soon after that as the last hand allowed. After scores were tallied and the winners declared, coffee and dessert were served. Then, the couples headed home to rescue their baby-sitters.

Porch Poetry

I love porches, and have since childhood.  I love porch sitting, porch reading and even porch painting. Most of all, I love porch music. Simple or complex, played by a group or a single lonesome fiddler, it’s a delight. Even the most down-home instrument – a washtub bass, a ukelele, a buzzing, well-played comb – makes me smile.

One of my favorite musical groups is the E-Flat Porch Band from McKinney, Texas. They’ve made their way around the state for years, and it’s always a pleasure to hear them – so much so that I’ll actually get in the car and travel to have the chance. I would have introduced them to you sooner, but there hasn’t been a video available of any quality. Now there is.

As entertaining as porch music can be, other things happen on porches. People visit with their neighbors and snap beans. They discuss politics, watch the grandkids play in the yard and hope upon hope that no one comes along to remind them of undone chores. You can find breezes on the porch in summer, and watch leaves drift in the fall. You can drink coffee, check your email, scratch the dog’s ears and even take a nap, if you really trust your neighbors. Porches are for solitary dreaming and family chatter – they’re one of the semi-permeable membranes of human social life.

Birth of a 4th-Grade Radical

Once upon a time, a petite, sloe-eyed little girl whose primary gift is the ability to melt adult hearts upon contact and whose nickname is “Princess” determined to take on her school district’s move from Halloween Party to Harvest Festival.

Like every child above the age of five, she emails and texts regularly. In the process of chatting with her cousins, she discovered each of them attends a school where Halloween parties are allowed. In their emails, her cousins told delicious stories of pre-Halloween activities: pumpkin carving, bat origami, spider-web draping and skeleton-making. All of this, of course, is simply a precursor to The School Party, a celebration of a day that on the Scale of Childhood Preferences may be second only to Christmas or Hanukkah.

For the Sloe-Eyed Princess’ cousins, there will be sugary cupcakes and candy, “Cauldron Punch”, “Grave Robber Gumdrops” and “Casket Cake”. One cousin is to narrate a class performance of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. Another is writing a poem that, while still under wraps, seems to involve a few body parts and a Brave Prince.

Best of all, each of the Little Sloe-Eyed Princess’ cousins will be given the freedom to dress in traditional Halloween costumes. At last year’s parties there were pirates, bed-sheeted ghosts and baby dolls, a Tinkerbell and a chain-gang prisoner. (The prisoner has parents who tend to watch a lot of early films. A lot.) There was the obligatory skeleton, a couple of vampires and an improvised ghoul. Everyone had fun, no one seemed to be traumatized, and everyone agreed the teacher dressed as a punk-rocker deserved her prize.