SUPER INTENSE, SUPERBLOOM 2023

It wasn't our first superbloom.  Living in Southern California since 1958, sumptuous flora streak the myth with brilliant orange, warm and cool yellow and violet, pure vibrating hues that I cannot achieve in painting.  

The sun and wind on a field of spring wildflowers is like hearing a pure violin solo, the stems swaying and their burden of colored blooms called to glisten and flag in the fresh spring air.

The fields of the Lord await not only our labor but our play.                         

                                                                             Each gifts us needed joy and bestows unrequested grace. 

The poet Frost asks, "...what to make of a diminished thing", but that is not our task here.  The vastness of a superbloom makes an impossible demand upon us, as all natural phenomena do - how to comprehend the ineffable vastness. 

We have been given some means to try, however. I hear distant laughter as the effort continues.  We have our constructed abstract measures: mathematical formulas, maps to scale, instruments to calibrate and traverse, a language of metaphors and similes, the music of orchestras and the artists' and the camera's technical mastery. 

They are roadmaps to the magnificent reality of perception.

Lancaster Poppy Reserve,  Spring 1992

In the beginning, it was whole, and so it is still. 

Our "poor power to add and subtract" leads us to yet comprehend the endless nature of creation. Just go be there.

                                                      The Temblor Range, Carrizo Plain, 2023

 

Grounded

The Garden Years: the 50's

A small town Midwestern childhood gifted me with the assumption that everyone had a garden, like having a storm windows or snow boots. It was just done, like visiting the cemetery on Memorial Day and buying a poppy from the American Legion members who sold them on Main Street. 

We didn't really need a garden. We lived comfortably on a street of homes filled with post-World War II families with stable jobs and growing children.  I never heard Mom and Dad, who disagreed on so much, ever quarreling about the garden, however. Two Depression babies would have a garden, cut and print.  

Beans, tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, corn, radishes. The beans and carrots were canned for winter.  The beans were bitter, muddied green, and mushy. The carrots just mushy. How could the labor-intensive process of home canning have left them with any vitamins? 

Much much later I learned to gently steam vegetables, bring them to the plate with structured softness. And fresh, yes; living in California meant I'd never have to eat a canned vegetable ever again. 

I must discuss Midwestern sweet corn! My little brother and I were child-greedy for summer corn and watermelon in their short and bountiful season. Fresh corn seems to fill bins at the local market almost all year, though, and food seasons, major culinary events in cold climates, are minor here.  

Best of all were the zinnias.  My mother loved them.  So we always had staunch, crisp, bouquets on the dining table, their colors shouting like fans when Henry Aaron hit a homer.  If my mother had been a flower, she would have been a zinnia. 

There were roses on our dining table in December now, zinnias decimated by garden snails that wouldn't go away. In December the Nativity crèche along the shoreline drive nestled under palm trees and gentle Pacific waves rolled onto a wide gentle beach, instead of snowbanks and pines. The way it must have been.

The earliest garden memory is from my father's childhood home. When we came to visit my grandparents, their chicken coop provided us with many family dinners, and the huge garden besides the usual veggies, had asparagus and a strawberry patch, berry bushes, and a huge swath of summer flowers, especially dahlias, my grandmother's favorite. 

When we visited in summer, we loved to go for an evening drive, hopping out of the car to pick wildflowers from the roadside ditches for her.  How she smiled when presented with a bouquet of them, though it was a twisted thing, caused by a serious stroke which left her dour face partially paralyzed. 

Then we'd stop at the Dairy Queen - a popular dessert, made with sugar, corn syrup, whey, mono and diglycerides, artificial flavor, guar gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan and Vitamin A Palmitate.

This in a state with more dairy cows than people.

The County Fair awarded prizes for the biggest pumpkins and squashes, the fattest pigs, the best flower arrangements, best home-sewn clothing - Mom's coat won a prize one year, as did my blueberry muffins. 

My childhood ended at age 12, like most do, but not with puberty, but a reset from middle earth to seacoast, small town intimacy to bursting urban expansion. Instead of dairy, it was about oil production and aircraft manufacturing.  We would not need a snow shovel, snow tires, storm windows, nor fear tornados. Mosquitoes would not plague us, nor extreme humidity. The flora and fauna were strange, semi-tropical and international, with a kind of monstrous flair and showmanship. They left me with a sense of malaise that fitted the experience of my adolescence that began in Southern California.

I thought parsley was the only herb there was. Mom, remembering her cafeteria work as a WAC, always placed a sprig on our plates, which my brother and I ignored. you could get abalone at the market in those days. 

The produce shelves were abundant, with all-year supplies of the greenest lettuces, strange fruits and berries from Mexico and Hawai'i.  And there were all the fresh flowers, citrus, avocados, and beef, and strange vegetables like jicama, eggplant, artichokes, chilis, fennel, radicchio; I still haven't stopped discovering them.

Snails ate our flowers, and mid-western favorites we tried grew listlessly, no doubt trying to tell us how confused they were. My father, stunned by the lack of rain and the warm dry climate, overwatered mightily, causing shrubs and trees to grow stunningly fast.  He seemed to spend all his time struggling with the unknown shrubs and hedges that enclosed the envelope of yard we had. My mother worked again, and we were now teenagers. Life was busier here, somehow.   And so, we never had another garden.  

We had a white birch tree that I loved; its branches weaved, its leaves danced, turned golden and then finally released themselves in November. Perhaps it remembered that it was supposed to do that back where it really belonged. 

I plant zinnias again, and find to my joy the snails don't seem to eat them.  And they are magnets for the butterflies of summer, monarchs, fritillaries, swallowtails, painted ladies.  My mom would have been so pleased.

Butterfly Visitations, continued

 9-11-2022  

Today as I worked on my infuriating sprinkler system, I saw a Painted Lady. The first one this year.  I remember the wonder of Spring, 2019, when millions of them flew through the streets of southern California.  It was a very good year. Rains at just the right time made possible a historic hatch of these fast flyers.  Strangers bonded over a phenomenon that was grace passing over us all.

 

After viewing The Tragedy of Macbeth

 1-29-2022    

After Viewing “The Tragedy of Macbeth”

 

Once graced by generous kingly presence

the inexorable warrior liege did

Bestride the ramparts, 

guardsafed the bonny banks and braes,

halls of honor earned by forfeit of precious blood and treasure.

Sterile castle, now shelled of love’s collected measure

the mind o’erthrown, and clarity of reason

Stay glaciate heart of betrayal and treason.

Silent vaulted rooms shadow the second forfeit 

stripped of sober noble glory, lost forever and forever

To endless night of dust and death.

No candle’s flame can sear this stain

nor basin of clear water shrive his name.

Happy Days, by Samuel Beckett: Mark Taper Forum

REFLECTING  ABOUT YESTERDAY

Happy Days,  by Samuel Becket, 1961, Mark Taper Forum

“...Winnie and Willie [may] have fallen into the careless disregard of a long marriage - critic comment

“So little to say, so little to do.. and the fear so great" - Winnie

“...The Taper stage is remade to look old-fashioned: enveloped in rich wood and outfitted with clamshell footlights and a crimson curtain. Is Izmir Ickbal’s design a nod to the elegant life that Winnie and Willie once knew? ... ... refined environment, the desolation of the couple’s predicament — baked in a white-hot glare by Stephen Strawbridge’s lighting — is like a museum diorama...Should we be forlorn as we watch? Or find comfort? Perhaps Beckett is trying to adjust our expectations so that we don’t sink.” review, LA Times

I recalled  30’s movie theaters, sumptuous red velvet and gilt clam shell cake decorations, depicted in Edward Hopper’s painting, New York Movie, 1939, and those Art Deco film houses downtown.  Winnie and Willie were once affluent, genteel, refined - he wears spats, a top hat, and tails; her dress is a black strapless rubbery-looking corset,to which she adds a pert hat perched over one brow, an ornate huge umbrella, and a large dusty serviceable black tote.  I thought how important my purse is to me,I tend it ferociously, and it’s the one accessory I still want to use to signal “class”. 

I didn’t get that Diane Weist was genteel, refined, but I should have; the artifacts were certainly clues.  Women of class always protected their skin with umbrellas and gloves.

J and I saw this play years ago at the Taper in May, 1990.  Bill Moor (stage actor transitioned to Hollywood film and TV) played Willie; Charlotte Raye was Winnie. (a TV actress who played housekeeper and house mother on Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life)  and  Part of  50/60 Vision -Thirteen Plays in Repertory; Conceived and produced by Edward Parone: Plays by Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones),Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, directed by Casey Perloff, who directed the off-Broadway production at the CSC Theater.

 “...articulate words; gratitude, often; recite the enduring mercies like a rosary; like a diamond necklace; the little miracles that fill and force the time...Rae...is the defiance of the species. 

Grace under pressure. Quiet resistance. Winnie against the dying world...Yes, there were isolated pockets of people.. who still thought that anything that came out of Rae's mouth had to be just plain hilarious, but fewer and fewer as the play progressed...

by the time this play is over, you know this Winnie is as frail and conquerable as the rest of us. But much, much braver. The hush that fell on the house in the second half, when all that is left of Winnie is her head, above the sand--her frightened eyes, her endless concatenation of words, her unfathomable dignity--was no accident.” - from Sylvie Drake’s LA Times review, March, 1990

“...In a sudden flash, Winnie's parasol is supposed to be consumed by flames, but when the moment came during a critics' preview, the fire fizzled. Spontaneous combustion resulted in a puff of smoke” - from NYT article about the off-Broadway performance

Northern Lights - Amazing Phenomenon

From some random person's Facebook post. Lucky I found it! Magnificent.  No wonder the ancients thinking conceived the idea and belief in miracles.

"A crack in the Earth's magnetic field over the weekend (not uncommon around the Equinox) allowed the Solar Wind to pour in over Norway. The result? A fantastic display of the Northern Lights, that look like it's almost flowing to the ground! Very cool. (spaceweather.com)"

Super Bowl Sunday miscellaneous fun

hermadphrodite cardinal reported in news

Lo-Tech Solutions.com - no more cord snakes while you vacuum

My mom and dad actually said all of these things to me when I was little.

Valley Village rainbow yesterday at 5PM - lots of rain