Archive for June, 2008
Filed under: ramblingPosted: June / 30 / 2008
Friday evening, we went down the street to Souplantation for dinner (which may have been a mistake given my stomach flu). There, we ran into a friend of mine from high school, with her parents and two kids. Her parents live in the neighborhood, and I run into them at the grocery store from time to time, but I haven’t seen her in a while. It was nice to catch up. The Little Guy sat next to her while she wrote down her e-mail and chatted her up.
Today, after the wedding shower, I met two alumnae for coffee. We sat and chatted for a while and then ended up going out for dinner together. We all keep in touch electronically, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen them.
Everybody wants to see us before we go. It’s a little wierd to be this popular.
I went to a wedding shower today. I was the bait, in fact; we told the bride that she was attending to a going-away party for me. She was sweet about it, and had been eager to come. Her mother had called her fiance and told him to stall her; when she arrived, she said to him, “So you were deliberately making me late!” It was funny to see him climb off the hook he’d been on. The shower was at a lovely home, with a beautiful yard and an excellent cat, who marched about demanding to be pet.
I ended up being put in charge of the party games. If you search online, you can find all kinds of objectionable bridal shower games, so I fell back on some simpler ones. It wasn’t until I got there that I realized that I had turned party games into handouts! We had one where they made words out of the bride and groom’s names, and another where we passed around a piece of paper and made a poem about the bride. Each person wrote one line, but the paper was folded such that they could only see the line immediatly previous. Then we played gift bingo. I put a lot of work into the bingo cards; I checked out their registry and made sure that I had things on the cards that had been purchased, so that went pretty well. A lengthy gift-opening phase can become dull, but it is really the whole point of a bridal shower. The bingo cards help people pay attention. Folks did get pretty competitive, actually, with the whole thing, and the little poem about the bride came out nicely. The whole point was to make the bride blush, but not embarass her.
There was a small amount of bridal shower girly-lore. The bride was warned that the number of ribbons she broke would be the number of children she had, for example, and the woman who organized the shower gathered all the ribbons into a lovely bouquet on a paper plate, as tradition demands. The women were all amused; the groom played along gamely, and actually thanked us at one point for not making everything too girly.
It was all quite pleasant, and a little old-fashioned. The bride was made a bit self-conscious, but not uncomfortably so, and everyone — church folks and family members — got along well.
Filed under: faithPosted: June / 30 / 2008
This morning at church, one woman asked for prayer, since she’s discovered she has glaucoma. This woman is one of the more high-strung members of the handbell choir (and the voice choir). I happened to be sitting next to the music director, who read my mind — she leaned over and asked, “So does she get to sign up for the medical marijuana?”
All I’m saying, is some folks could benefit from a little relaxation, herbal or otherwise.
What would E.B. White do?
One of the few grown-up books that remains unpacked is the E.B. White collection. Mostly, it’s little bits and pieces, random paragraphs that were tucked into nooks and crannies of the New Yorker. One wonders what White would think of the state of the language these days — the sort of writing that appears in the blogosphere can be appalling, but then one finds passages in this book that seem like blog entries. Take this one, titled “Unwritten,” and dated 4/26/30:
Sometimes we regret our failure to write about things that really interest us. The reason we fail is probably that to write about them would prove embarassing. The things that interested us during the past week, for example, and that we were unable or unwilling to write about (things that stand out clear as pictures in our head) were: the look in the eye of a man whose overcoat, with velvet collar, was held together by a bit of string; the appearance of an office after the building had shut down for the night, and the obvious futility of the litter; the head and shoulders of a woman in a lighted window, combing her hair with infinite care, making it smooth and neat so that it would attract someone who would want to muss it up; Osgood Perkins in love with Lillian Gish; a man on a bicycle on Fifth Avenue; a short eulogy of John James Audubon, who spent his life loafing around, painting birds; an entry in Art Young’s diary, about a sick farmer who didn’t know what was the matter with himself but thought it was probably biliousness; and the sudden impulse that we had (and very nearly gratified) to upend a large desk for the satisfaction of seeing everything on it slide off slowly onto the floor.
This is the kind of stuff I like to blog about; I don’t know if White would like to blog, so that he could write about these things, or if he would avoid it, because it would be better to leave these things unwritten (which he didn’t do, after all).
Well, there’s really just the one way. I’m allergic to both of them.
I tend to react to mold and dust by becoming headachey and congested. Venice has been soaking in the Adriatic for centuries now, so it can get pretty skanky. Between bringing in boxes from the garage and actually putting stuff in the boxes, I have been raising a lot of dust around here. The result is that I have trouble sleeping at night, on account of the congestion and coughing. It’s OK; the sooner I get the bedroom done, the better that will be, although it won’t quite clear up until the job is finished.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Venice. The thing to do in Venice is to start your morning by pulling out your woefully inadequate map of the city (all maps of Venice are, by definition, woefully inadequate), and picking out a distant site: an island or a church or the ghetto, perhaps. Then fold up the map and head off. You may or may not make it to your goal, but you will have a lovely day. No better place to get lost in.
Oddly enough, it was in Venice that I really learned to see Mark Rothko. I’d been surrounded by Renaissance stuff, having just come from Florence and Rome and all those lovely sunny frescoes, and on my first day in Venice went and found the requisite chiaroscuro Tintorettos. Of course I’d lined up early for San Marco, and it was breathtaking. I was in line with a fellow who had been there a few years before when the place had flooded, and, sad as it was to see the water lines on the mosaics, he said it was also quite beautiful, as the water reflected all the golden tiles, and the whole place sparkled. At any rate, there is actually a small Guggenheim museum in Venice — Peggy’s palazzo. It’s a very small museum, clean and bright and modern. It’s nice to see all these modern American pieces after seeing all that Renaissance stuff — you understand a bit about what they thought they were changing, the ways in which they were new. The Rothko, for some reason, moved me especially, perhaps because I’d been looking at art that was all about the relationship between light and the soul for two days, and I was able to see that in Rothko’s work in a way that I hadn’t grasped before.
That whole trip — 12 years ago it was — taught me a lot about how the context in which we see art shapes the way we read and relate to the art.
No serendiptious moments of beauty in my apartment, though. Just slogging through boxes.
Our kids aren’t the overscheduled types. No music lessons, no team sports, no clubs (not forever, just not currently). This summer, however, we signed up the Little Guy for summer science school. It’s a free 2-week program through the local public school district. It starts at 8:30 and ends at 12:00.
He’s really enjoying it! He likes going to a new school campus, which is good practice for the fall, and already seems to feel more or less at home there. He came home today with an object constructed out of wood scraps and nails he called a boat. It needed more nails for the stabilizer, so he and Daddy mended it. After lunch, he explained it to me: “Let’s play school.” He brought out a bowl of water and welcomed me formally: “Welcome to summer science school. Let’s see what floats and what doesn’t. Does wood float? Let’s see.” And then he put his boat in the water, and then he put several other items in and quizzed me about them, explaining flotation in terms of water displacement (although he didn’t use the word “displacement”). I played along. When I had to go to the bathroom, I asked permission, “Can I just go, or do I need a hall pass?” “Oh, you need a hall pass,” he replied promptly, and fished up a piece of paper from the table and handed it to me with a flourish.
We played Uno tonight. The Little Guy is pretty good. Miss Baby hears us laughing and chatting from the other room, and fusses and complains because she’s missing out on all the fun. I won both rounds, and my DH said I was lucky, and the Little Guy said, “She’s not lucky because she won, she’s lucky because I love her!” He continued like this, asking me if I loved him, and, “can you see the hearts in my eyes?”
We signed the lease, we got the house: we know where we will live in North Carolina. It has three bedrooms, and two bathrooms, and a nice back deck with an enormous yard. It’s within walking distance of my school, and near what looks like a good school for the Little Guy. It’s a nice place in a nice location, and it’s so nice to know already where we are going to live.
I’ve got a little stomach flu going, for heaven’s sakes. My DH let me sleep all afternoon, much to the cat’s delight. While I was asleep, he cleaned up the living room, and when I awoke, Miss Baby was spinning in the open space, singing and laughing in her hat and shoes. I did get to pack a little this morning, and hopefully will be recovered enough tomorrow to pack again. But it’s such a nuisance.
The Little Guy and I were out and about today. We took in his recycling, we stopped by the elementary school where he will have his science program starting tomorrow, and we went to the neighborhood library. He was pleased with the school, and is now more excited about the science program. The library was a big event. The parking lot was full — they were having a ventriloquist on the lawn, and there was a big crowd — and this impressed the Little Guy. We signed up for the summer reading program with the cute teenage volunteer. He filled out the card himself. When it came to the space for “school,” he said, “Well, that’s a little complicated.” I told him to just fill in his current school. He picked out three of the original Magic School Bus books, and then we went and got him a library card. I filled out the address and phone number portion of the application, and he wrote in his name and came up with his own PIN (never ask a 6-year-old what he wants for his PIN, btw). He was very proud and careful when it came time to write his name on the library card itself, spelling his last name out loud to himself as he wrote (sometimes he has trouble spelling this name). It was nice, helping my little boy get his first library card, at the same little neighborhood library where I got my first library card. I think I still have it somewhere.
On the way home, I commented on how all our errands were really his errands. He was pleased, and said he felt important, like Daddy, because Daddy has lots of important jobs too.
