"Friday Night Frolic" — Meet Me at the Playground

[An FNF repost—initially published in 2011—because I love these guys, and they know how to usher spring into summer. Memorial Day is for remembering the past, commemorating and thanking our loved ones, and glimpsing into future's shiny possibilities. It's also the time of year that marks the beginning of days that open wide and warm, reminding us that the world is chockfull of beautiful things.]

At the playground, or in the park. Or anywhere the sun's warmth and the cool, breezy air conspire to liberate those heavy burdens tucked in your worn, leather satchel. (Gosh, that arm must be sore.) You might want to swap the satchel for something light, like a crisp canvas tote bag filled with peaches and champagne and a Frisbee. Wear your All Stars. Or your woven slip-on sidewalk surfers. Or flip-flops. Or nothing at all. Bring your felt Indiana Jones hat, or a baseball cap, or a straw fedora, or anything brimmed and easily stolen by the wind.

It's been a long time.

How will I know you? Will you still look the same?

Remember my small Brooklyn Heights apartment on Kane, where I gazed at Lady Liberty from the third floor paint-chipped window? I could walk to the park from there. A long walk. I won't do it like that, though. Not this time. I want to get there quickly. I'll take the subway from Cobble Hill to Prospect Park. (If I can still do that. If it's still there.) Up Flatbush. I always liked the underground surprises along Flatbush.

I'll be waiting for you. At the swings. Adorned in a long, gauzy skirt, white t-shirt, beige linen blazer and crinkle scarf. And flip-flops. We'll spread a colorful, vintage Peruvian blanket under a large singing sycamore, pop the cork and consume fuzzy fruit and bubbly. Our cheeks will blush with spring's lustrous shade—golden rays and mossy, ripening trees, cherry plumaged cardinals and deep blue, blossoming crocuses.

Late afternoon you'll decide to pull the old drum sticks from your tote and bang them against the tin filled with chocolate mouse layer cake. I'll be amazed you've kept them all these years. I'll want to cry, but I won't. The ice cream guy will come by with his cart and you'll buy two vanilla bean ice cream cones, and we'll toss the Frisbee while licking streams of sweet goo racing down the waffled spires, running through our fingers. We'll put thick blades of green grass between our thumbs and blow. If it's not playing on someone's transistor radio we'll still hear music in the air. We might even sing. We might even dance.

Then we'll head over to the playground. Remember how we used to play? Hopscotch or jump rope or the see-saw or monkey bars... You used to dangle from that damned center bar and never let me pass. We'd spin on the little merry-go-round 'til we were dizzy.

Remember some kid almost lost a leg on that spinny thing? We won't do any spinning this time. But we might hop on that little springy frog. We might go for a slide on the big one with bumps in the middle, and jump through recycled tires. (Though we might also need some Dramamine to do it all.)

Or perhaps we'll just sit on the colorful, vintage Peruvian blanket, and eat ripe peaches. And layered cake. And vanilla bean ice cream. And we'll listen to spring's symphony:  birds, swaying trees, the little waterfall, babies on the carousel, and pedal boats on the pond.

And get to know one another again.

When it's silent, in that shared-grin moment, we'll know it's time to pack up our bags. We'll meander past the playground one last time. You'll be whistling. I'll challenge you to a monkey bar duel. But this time, I know you'll let me pass. This time you might even hold my hand. In mid-air. As I pass. Your arm will no longer be sore.

We'll remember that we were always layers of percussion and harmony.

We'll still like each other. A lot.

I'll want you to take the subway back home with me. So we can get there quickly.

Percussion and Harmony.

(And lots more over at Pearl and the Beard. Go visit!)

Friday Night Frolic — Acorns

Tuesday was not just a wedding anniversary it
was grey and blustery, rain-soaked
intervals and intervals that couldn't
decide whether they
were intervals

Nineteen years ago, Tuesday, it was the same
grey morning spit which did not stop a golf
game, a walk along the ocean and into
church and everyone said it meant
good luck

But luck is hardly a factor except
when you're down on your luck
and your spouse looks as
grey as the day you
were married

Or the day nineteen years later when you're walking
the dog, or the cat, or the pig or whatever it is
you've domesticated and from the south a storm
of all colors churns maple and oak leaves
and acorns

A day more menacing than the day you were
married enamored of one another, long
before sweet quirks actualized as
annoyances that drove
you crazy

Like his pathological resistance to plan anything or
engage in hyper polemics, as opposed to, say
avoidance, or his addiction to e-bay and
old movie posters too big for
mere walls

(And you thought, you really thought, that
you wouldn't mind if he ate crackers in
your bed)

How is it one in every two marriages survive?
When the veins of heaven distend with squalls
and the oak's acorn-spittle flops on your  head
you quicken pace and feel bad that you ever
loathed him

That there were those moments, days, months, when you loathed
one another—year two, year five, year twelve, year...
the sky and pavement bend heliotrope and two wide-eyed
squirrels chase barb-capped nuts, acorns as dark
as mahogany

They taste of bitter tannin but the squirrels don't mind
they pounce on fallen mast knowing the cache
which is to be their sustenance in the cold
dark months is all that will get
them through

And then, an interval
decidedly!

Great berry chromatic bursts, wind funneling acorns
into its vortex, you're in the storm's eye which
seems oddly not annoying or vile, and as it
spins out on the tar it dumps brilliant
green acorns

In your pocket you place two firm, sage-lacquered
nuts, bring them home as a warm breeze carries
your back.

*     *     *

The Acorn's first release, The Pink Ghosts (2004), was a sumptuous tribute to the band's native Ottawa. Since then, The Acorn has gone on to record several albums, including the acclaimed Glory Hope Mountain (2007), an anthology of mellifluous and vivid stories inspired by song writer Rolf Klausener's Central-American-born mother. And later, No Ghost (2009), described (direct from their website) as: 

...a recording swaddled in dichotomy: togetherness and isolation, acoustic and electric, destruction and restoration.

Which began as:

...hazy late-night improvisations, early morning melodies pulled from the thinning threads of sleep. Modernity clashed with the bucolic via exploratory percussion, feedback, acoustic textures and the natural surrounding sounds.

 Watch those acorns!

Not the Usual Frolic — Summer Hours

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up. 

-W. Somerset Maugham

But I did. As I do every day, even if it's a day in which I cannot take a seat at my desk. And every day that passes, every day of these last two weeks plus some, as such reminds me of how little I've accomplished—at least in terms of scribbling out anything cogent. But school, you see, ended. Summer began. Maine awaited. Celebrations befell. The beach beckoned. Flower and herb pots called (although I've not returned the message). My niece, the Magpie, stayed with us for several days. She loves to flit about and take one thing from another to build something of her own. Anything really. She's a wonder. Then, there was the search for a new car which quite literally gobbled time. True, it ate up every last morsel. And drooled some. (How in the world could I have expected less?) Mourning the loss of the ten-year-old car: entirely unexpected.

I've gone and done something ridiculous. Three rows. For the kids. Ridiculous. Less efficient. She's a beast. An ebony zaftig. A sphinx I can't seem to crack. But she gets six to the beach quite comfortably. And what a beach. Not the beach to which absolutely everyone-and-their-in-laws-in-the-burbs clusters. Oh no. I never liked that beach. Not even as a teen. Back then it had a crowded boardwalk, loud radios, gum-snapping dolls, the scent of baby oil, and lots of gold chains. (But the bus got me there and so I went.) I doubt it's changed much. Maybe it has. Regardless. It's still crowded. At the beach, I don't want to run into people I know. Unless I've planned it. Otherwise, I want Maugham in my lap and a lifeguard who watches the kids. 

He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. ~William Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.

I stored chicken stock in an old glass milk bottle. Lulu thought it was lemonade and drank it. Seriously, Mom? Did you have to put it in a milk bottle?! It was not the sort of thirst quenching drink she'd anticipated. Should I have labeled it? I thought that it so closely approximated a urine specimen that she'd surely steer clear. Besides, who would drink something from a milk bottle that did not even remotely resemble milk?

At the graduation party for her granddaughter, the valedictorian, Aunt Sue (Mother's sister) came bearing gifts for her three nieces. A box of Grandmother's books with copyrights dated from the 1920s (W. Somerset Maugham's Short Stories) through 1979 (Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance). Backwoods Betty grabbed The Case of the Cautious Coquette, from Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series. I took Roman MacDougald's The Whistling Legs, and Carter Dickson's The Cavalier's Cup. As well as the Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham. (Grandma, it seems, liked mysteries. Aunt Sue, it seems, was surprised by this.) Mary glanced at the box and quickly turned and walked away before any of us could put a hardcover in her hand. I don't blame her. The dusty novels are not allergen-free. Mother, curious as to the box's contents, pulled out a few titles but ultimately slipped them back in, refraining as well.

For a while, when I was a girl, Grandmother lived on a dairy farm. My goal for quite some time during those years was to finagle, each summer weekend, an overnight stay at her place on the farm. Once there, I stole eggs out from under the hens in the chicken coop, chased cats up trees, jumped from the third floor to the second in the hayloft, milked cows, hugged goats and played with the Wright girls at their homestead across the street from the barn. Sometimes, I got to ride Missy the pony. Back then, I welcomed the respite from the noise of the city and the opportunity to run wild while Grandmother baked a strawberry-rhubarb pie. I do not remember ever seeing on the bookshelves of Grandmother's apartment any of the amusing old titles that Aunt Sue had packed in a box. Come to think of it, I do not remember ever drinking milk there, but I do recall whipping cream with a hand blender to the thickest peak in the state. And pouring it over pie.

From the bottom of the stairs Max calls up to me. It's late and he should be getting to bed. Instead he's asking: Oh hey Mom, do you know what this stuff is that's in a dairy bottle?

What stuff, Max? I shout down to him, chuckling to myself, as I try to finish this piece.

It looks like pee. Do you know what it is? It's in that milk bottle? What is it?

Now, I cannot stop laughing. It's funny what one should decide to ask. Or what one thinks oughtn't (or needn't) be asked. I reveal the secret, and decide to close up shop and return to Maugham. I can no longer concentrate. So much for cogency.

Summer Hours: Here and there, like the Magpie. Friday Night Frolics optional. Time off with the kids, mandatory.

(By the way, is anyone reading Joe Blair? I like this guy, and he keeps a blog, too. See his latest post here. )

  Rusted Root - Send Me on My Way by wayne21

"Friday Night Frolic" — Pretty Little Lamb(chop)

Look, with an album named Mr. M, cryptic lyrics hidden therein, boys slinking about their own island, scratching and whispering, mocking emotion, well, it seems this evening calls for the proper attire—though, the Suburban Soliloquist is having difficulty locating her black Ray-Bans. (Maybe that's because she doesn't own black Ray-Bans.)

But she's got the T-shirt and she's guessing the geeky Kurt Wagner wouldn't mind her slipping it on. Not at all. Especially if she were pouring him a glass of white. Which she is. He will arrive, Wagner, yes, this very night (tell her traveling hubby and she will deny it), but she can't tell you when or how, or else...

And because the Suburban Soliloquist is in the midst of packing (of which she can't, or won't?, again elaborate), and feels at this moment that she can say it no better, she will permit the Village Voice—which does not hide, scratch or whisper—to speak for her. But first, she'll tell you this: Lambchop is a band. True. Lambchop is  also a...

...vanishingly rare band allowed to exist over several geologic eras of pop-culture time, pursuing a singular, demented muse. Lambchop is an island, removed from the squalor of everyday world, so terrifically inscrutable that you even start looking for significance in their name: not pork chop, but lamb chop. Surely that must mean something. 

Mr. M is, at once, one of the band’s most open-hearted and acidic records. It opens with a flourish of strings that invoke memories of Frank Sinatra’s great, gloomy indigo-jazz records with string arranger Nelson Riddle. The clothes are old ones, slightly threadbare, and they are ones Lambchop have a winking relationship with, dating back at least to 2001′sNixon. You can smell the used-record-sleeve on them. And so, apparently, can Wagner, something he’s quick to draw your attention to. When he enters the song, he appears to be both commenting ironically on its motion and somehow directing its action: “Grandpa’s coughing in the kitchen/ But the strings sound good/ Maybe add some flutes/ And how do get the cups out from over there?”

  Lambchop - If Not I'll Just Die by MergeRecords

*   *   * 

And now, she's pouring him that glass of white...

  Lambchop - Gone Tomorrow by City Slang

The wine tasted like sunshine in the basement.  (For some peculiar reason, this little nugget nudges the Suburban Soliloquist to reach for her 1960s flashcards.)

What were they doing in the basement? Hmm...

Wagner, and his pretty, pretty Lambchop. How they do it they'll never tell.


Listen to more Lambchop here. Lambchop visits Jimmy Fallon, late night, tonight.

(To be honest, er, um, the Suburban Soliloquist has no secret information, she's not even sure who wrote this post.)

(But, the wine did taste like sunshine in the basement.)

Friday Night Frolic — Enumerating Story

[Source]

1.  To begin: Flaws. One of my many, is that I've never been able to calculate. Calculus, trigonometry, even algebra, simple logarithmic functions, escape me. In high school, Geometry was the only category of mathematics that I was somewhat able to grasp. That's because it included doodling. (Well, didn't it?) I've often wondered if this failing was solely because I could not understand mathematical relations or if I simply refused to try, refused to to understand. Or. Refused to accept that anything could be answered with such certainty. One plus one, yes, two. But even that simple equation never seemed so simple to me. And this suspicion was confirmed after my second child was born, when in the haze of endless nights punctuated by frightening infant caterwauls and toddler walkabouts it became clear that the idea of one plus one equalling two was nothing more than an algorithmic farce.

I wonder if my inability to calculate bears any connection to a cognitive deficit known as dyscalculia, which Wiki describes as an "innate difficulty in learning or comprehending arithmetic." The reason, though, is more likely disinterest. In any event, I've no compulsion to further explore what I've accepted as a lifelong inadequacy and limitation. I surrender all calculations to the accountants. After all, not everyone can be a mathematician.

2.  Some of us have to write.

3.  Some of us have to tell stories.

4.  And some of us, well, all of us, should listen...

5.  To this...

A short short film that I came across the other day while visiting one of my favorite magical depositories on the internet, Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is, in the words its remarkable curator, Maria Popova, "a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are." 

Ken Burns, on story:



Stories as acceptable and sincere manipulation. Waking the dead. Building emotional truth. Keeping wolves from the door. Continuing ourselves. Reminding us that it's just Ok.

At about 4:20 Burns illustrates the how and why in which he conveys story. It's a powerful and vulnerable moment that offers us insight into to his success. Moreover, he shares my suspicion that one plus one does not always equal two.

6.  (Now, there's something called story algorithm, but I don't want to go there just yet.)

7. As a sort of book club experiment, I've been reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes along with Lu who is currently reading the book for her English class. Other than Zen in the Art of Writing, it had been a long time since I'd read Bradbury, since I'd read Something Wicked, and as I flip the pages of his book, I'm reminded of why I adored his stories as a young girl. The grand collector of metaphors set out to have a helluva lot of fun. He stuffed his head with anything he could from every imaginable field. He went to carnivals and cinemas and read comic books and nearly everything else he could collect from the library—short stories, essays and poetry. Only the greats, nothing modern. He likes to say that he practically lived in the library.

The world in which Bradbury lived as a child is very much alive in his works, and it's hard for me to believe that a man who extols the virtues of writing only for the pure joy and fun of writing ever had a moment in which he feared he'd waste time writing something that might not be very good. Even so, by the age of thirty he had his first novel published. And what followed was awfully good.

At the library, from Something Wicked:

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mangolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes. Way down the third book corridor, and oldish man whispered his broom along in the dark, mounding the fallen spices...

Something Wicked has instantly transported me back to the world of Will and Jim, and Mr. Dark and the salesman toting the curious lightening rod—back to the eclipse of morning's first hours when a flashlight under the bed covers lit fantastical words ablaze. It's been difficult to fight the temptation to read ahead of Lu and her class, but I'm holding back, filling my time with other stories, considering what and how I will write, collecting ideas, piecing words together in such a way, reminding myself that it's just Ok. These are the kinds of calculations I can do in my head. And it's a helluva lot a fun.

*  *  *
8.

Dead Combo is the ten year old band of friends Tó Trips and Pedro Gonçalves, of Portugal. They began their partnership after they recorded together, for the first time, a contribution to the tribute album to the late Portuguese guitarist, Carlos Paredes.

Together, Trips and Gonçalves have created their own story as well as their own incarnate personae whom they describe as "characters that could have come from a dark comic book: a caretaker and a gangster." They have recorded together, as well as with the Royal Orquestra das Caveiras (Royal Skulls Orchestra), with whom they released a live DVD in 2010. 

Story can be told many ways. You can find more of Dead Combo's story music here.

Friday Night Frolic – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Shaving

We've reached a milestone here. And isn't he a sport to have permitted his mother to capture the whole ceremonious first slice of silver across the creamy, pale skin of his face? She won't, however, post the video.

This Friday's Frolic is going to be highly abridged as the Suburban Soliloquist has been strapped to her chair all week, working on a feature article (what is that anyway?) which she may or may not post on this blog, depending upon how it all unravels. (At the moment, it is way too long for a blog post.) For some reason, as apolitical as she is, she's been inexplicably drawn to a major controversy that has cast national attention on the city in which she grew up. And it's not the fact that the city is near bankrupt.

In any event, she hasn't been on the internet much, other than for research reasons, but hopes to return early next week for a proper posting and jaunt around the blogging community.

In the meantime, a little video sent by friend-of-the-shut-in:

For more information on the talented harpist Frédéric Yonnet visit his website, or listen to his interview over at NPR.

Have a beautiful weekend. Maybe the sun will come out tomorrow?

(Is that really her baby?)

Art by Max

Friday Night Frolic — What's Happening?

Snails Space with Vari-Lites, by David Hockney

OR: What Happens When the Suburban Soliloquist Searches for a Moment of Peace and Quiet.

Every December when asked what he wanted for Christmas, her father would, without fail, respond: Peace and quiet! He'd say it so fast and severely that she thought it was one word. Peacenquiet. In the colonial house in which they lived, on a street perpendicular to the fire station, within two blocks from the elementary school, in a city of fifty thousand, quiet was found only in the thick, Black Japan lacquer of night when the next day's clothing folded gracefully over wood chest at bed's foot, school books heaped in their rubber straps, the French horn and piano intermissionized, batted and clawed Teen Beat magazines softened, Hummel-murdering footballs idled in the toy box, and six children, boys in one room, girls in the other, slept soundly while parents exhaled conciliatory snores.

Peacenquiet is the night's oasis. 

On a mid-April morning, half-way through an active week-long vacation, in a cold, wet Washington, D.C., the Suburban Soliloquist, roaming the halls of an enormous Greek Revival building set back from the rumpus of stretched streets, and stocked with American art, thirsted for peace and quiet (why she expected it there still baffles her). Hours earlier she had enthusiastically entered the Museum, children in tow, and set forth purposefully through its wide halls, vaulted galleries and curved stairways. Her rambunctious young teens, not to be slowed by portraits or sculptures or old mousetraps or mothers, quickly set out on their own path. But in the chamber that housed the Annie Leibovitz exhibition, and at de Kooning's frenzied pastel sketch of JFK, and by John Quidor's Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, and near Albert Bierstadt's fantastical paintings of the nation's frontiers, the children conspired to descend upon their mother, robbing her of peace and quiet.

Go see The Art of Video Games! she finally suggested (or demanded?). Third floor. Text me when you're done. And they were off without a question, the hall and stairwell echoing the notes of their laughter and heavy feet. She was certain to not be disturbed for a long while.

Later, she made her way back to the third floor, where she stumbled upon the black box of David Hockney's Snails Space. Inside: a long leather bench on which to sit, silence and aloneness, not one other museum goer in the box. She sat. She stared at, and listened to, the illuminated, multicolored canvases of a world within a world—a moving, breathing model of streams and mountains, valleys and woodland which changed as the light by which it was illuminated altered; a shy bleating of activity emitting from the landscape. It made her think of a pop-out book. For several moments she sat alone. Five minutes? Ten minutes? Alone. Could it be? It was beautiful. An oasis. Peaceful. Quiet. Snails. Space. The world within the world. Just as Hockney had intended.*

And what happens when the Suburban Soliloquist finds a moment of peace and quiet? 

Two young teens tend to find her. (Often, when she is trying to digitally capture worlds within worlds.) And decide to sit and stay. Look and listen. They speak in whispers. (And ratcheted-up whispers.)

Max: What's happening?

Lulu: Are the snails moving?

SS: Living.

Max (surprised): Wh-what?

(Pause. Room darkens and lightens.)

Lulu: The snails are moving!

Max: Where are the snails?

(Pause)

Max: Really, where are the snails?

(Pause. Bleating heard.)

Max: Where's the sound coming from?

(Pause. Room darkens.)

Lu: What happened?

SS (into Lu's ear): Hold on, it's not done yet.

Max: I seriously don't get it.

(Pause.)

Lu (annoyed): Mom, what's going on?

(Inaudible whispers.)

(Kids, mildly agitated, exit. Camera out. Suburban Soliloquist: stands and exits.)

She made her way out of the black box, following the children toward the neon lights of Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway, wishing she could have lingered longer in the blackness of the box. But she would not leave Hockney and the snails entirely behind. She was to carry the bleat and tinct of them with her throughout their Capitol excursion, and far beyond.

The space of a snail is the day's oasis.

Peacenquiet.

* “The installation unfolds as a kind of silent performance that evokes Hockney's experience of designing sets and costumes for operas even as he lost his hearing. In the absence of sound, pure visual experience compensates and suggests a different narrative to every viewer. The title offers a pun and a suggestion from the artist. To sit in this installation through the entire cycle of light shifts is to take time for what Hockney called "the pleasure of looking" that leads us to understand "how beautiful the world is.” - From Snails Space with Vari-Lites, "Painting as Performance" at the American Art Museum.

*  *  *

NOW, for more sensory experiences, and the pleasure of looking and listening:

From the website of Providence's Veteran's Memorial Auditorium, where Bobby McFerrin will be performing on May 10, 2012:

With a four-octave range and vast array of vocal techniques, McFerrin is not a mere singer; he is music’s last true Renaissance man, a vocal explorer who combines jazz, folk and a multitude of world music influences. As one of the foremost guardians of music’s rich heritage, he remains at the vanguard with his natural, beautiful and timeless music that transcends all borders and embraces all cultures.

McFerrin takes his audience through demonstrations that continually illustrate how music interacts with brain and emotion, such as the video above from the World Science Fesitival, 2009 (more on the topic of sound perception can be found at PBS's The Music Instinct—Science and Song). He charms, delights, unites—with a common chorus—and even transforms his admirers by creating his own oasis, engaging others in his improvisational forays. 

From his website:

Listening to Bobby McFerrin sing may be hazardous to your preconceptions. Side effects may include unparalleled joy, a new perspective on creativity, rejection of the predictable, and a sudden, irreversible urge to lead a more spontaneous existence.  

Here, the emotional spectrum of crying until you laugh and laughing until you cry:

This is what's happening: the pleasure and wonder of looking and listening, new perspectives, spontaneity, a common chorus. How beautiful the world is. 

Friday Night Frolic — Seeing the Day

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. 

                                                                                        ~ Albert Einstein

Keep moving. It's been that kind of week. In Boston's Chinatown this past Wednesday everything seemed to be moving. Holding balance. People crossed busy streets when traffic walk signals told them to do so. Pedestrians hummed over street vendors' bins of fresh vegetables and fruits. Chinese willows shook themselves out in the breeze. In Mary Soo Hoo Park, locals huddled and swayed around small groups of men playing Chinese chess with brightly inscribed wooden pieces. Sirens flashed and swung in the air, in transit, to and fro Tufts Medical Center. 

And then there was the muted sound and movement of a pretty bicycle secured to a pole at the corner of Kneeland and Tyler, which stopped me in my hurried tracks. The gentle downward slope of the top bar of the dark frame, the woven basket, the leather saddle, and bowed fenders caught my eye. A city bike. A woman's city bike. I wondered if she, the rider, had ridden the bike to work, or if she had met a friend for dim sum, or if she was simply taking her Miniature Schnauzer, whom she had carefully tucked in her basket, for a stroll through the park. Had I seen her poking through the glossy Chinese eggplant? Was she wearing a knee-length wool skirt, cable-knit sweater and long linen scarf? Maybe she was a resident at Tufts and had come from her apartment in Fenway. In the hospital she was dressed in scrubs and listened carefully to patients.

I stayed a while by the bike, and took several photographs, feeling as if I were in a state of inertia in the center of a mob of exertion. I didn't want to leave. Yet I did want to leave. On the bike. I wanted to ride it around the whole damn city, like I'd done all those years ago on my raised-seat touring bike, racing around Beantown, through its emerald parks, or to the office downtown. On a mission. But this particular bike, the city bike, was not meant for mission. It was meant for hanging back, for diddling, for loitering, for which, I realized—simultaneously with those leisurely thoughts—I had no time.

At the Craniofacial Pain Center, Dr. Correa asked me how I slept. 

Not well.

Next time, we'll talk about sleep, he smiled. 

And then I was off with my thrice-adjusted mouth guards, racing to my car, maneuvering the slow-lanes/fast-lanes of 93 South, open throttle toward another city where I was to pick up the kids, all the while wishing I'd done what I ordinarily do: take the commuter train. 

It's a balancing act, life, though I don't feel like I ever truly keep balance. I lurch to the left, wobble to the right, and sometimes, on a lucky occasion, center myself amply enough to see a day as less than overwhelming. It's all right. I'm happy to see the day. See it right through.

*  *  *

And now, ballads and jingles that I like to call, well, loiter music.

About singer/songwriter/pianist Joe Purdy, from thesixtyone:  

Purdy, an independent singer/songwriter from Arkansas, put in his time working at a loading dock and as a counselor at a private high school before his song "Wash Away" became synonymous with the 2004 season of ABC's Lost. Purdy left Arkansas for California in 2001, where he learned how to play the piano and began writing songs. He went on to record several homemade albums, breaking into the L.A. music scene with 2003's StompinGrounds. It was around this time that Purdy was contacted by J.J. Abrams, the executive producer of Lost, who asked Purdy to write a song for the show. Purdy, who at the time was visiting an island on a river in upstate New York, wrote "Wash Away," which went on to chart in the Top 25 on the /iTunes country charts…

In addition to his music heard on Lost, his songs have also appeared on the soundtrack of the TV series Grey's Anatomy, and the motion picture Peaceful Warrior.

From Last Clock On The Wall:

  01 Let Me Sing to You by Suburban Soliloquist

And, one of my favorites from Paris In The Morning:

  03 Brand New Set of Wings by Suburban Soliloquist

In total, Purdy has self-released a total of twelve CDs, the latest being This American.

All of Purdy's music can be listened to for free, on his website, available on album playlists.

Friday Night Frolic — The Metamorphosis (To Come)

'Now my dears,' said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, 'you may go into the fields or down the lane, 
but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; 
he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.'
~Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit

There are forces—intrinsic, extrinsic, otherworldly, Olympian—in the preteen psyche that I hadn't anticipated. The girl is petitioning for a room makeover. Well, is it any wonder? I shouldn't be so surprised, after all, she is surrounded by storybook misfortune: rabbits captured for pie, eggs swiped from ducks, foxy-whiskered, prick-eared gentleman not to be trusted, and owls who skin squirrels alive.

Lulu, who turns thirteen in a little more than two months, has lived among the red hued toile rendering—wall covering and coordinating balloon shades—of Beatrix Potter's creatures for as many years. 

I hadn't thought about Potter's nursery rhyme characters in that light when I decorated Lu's room more than a dozen years ago. I thought, to be candid, that the paper and fabric made for a nursery design with which I could live and a wall covering that would easily grow up with Lu. Now I wonder how easily she's slept for all those years in that angelic, antique three quarter bed while Potter's beasts dallied on the walls.

I admit, the toile was for me. 

But thirteen is a coming of age birthday—a right of passage that has been known to be marked (her brother's room as precedent) by inner sanctum transformation. Hence, Lu's passage into teen-hood will be observed by the conspicuous and abrupt changes that are characteristic of any metamorphosis: a permutation of color; the shedding of layers; altered structures.

The coming transformation is for Lu.

I worry. I wonder if any morsel of Lu's youth will be recognizable in her transmuted cocoon. Or shall I enter to find a Kafka nightmare? Lu as a gargantuan pest?

Goodbye Jemima Puddle-Duck, Pigling Bland, Squirrel Nutkin, my Peter. Augmented inner sanctums take no victims. (Nor—I hope—accidents, like fluorescent permutations.)

*  *  * 

  Mason Jar Music Presents… Lacrymosa - "Weltschmerz (Smitten Song)" by MasonJarMusic

Lacrymosa is the stage name for 22 year old Brooklyn singer/pianist/composer Caitlin Pasko, whose warm, tranquil music gently fills space, time, and captivates. Her second album, Selah, was released in 2010.

Pasko studied classical piano from a young age, and quickly developed a style which she has described as whimsical forest music. Her angelic soprano lends itself well to her otherworldly sound, as well as the pastoral imagery her songs evoke.

Pasko's lyrics are peppered with fields of gold, roses, buttercups, parrots, trees, spiders and tiny horses—just the type of visuals that also might make for something really sweet, like, say...

 Wallpaper?

  01 - Not About Want by Suburban Soliloquist