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

August Ease and Interlude

Out at the tip of Sandy Neck, a coastal barrier beach whose duck-bill tip dips into Barnstable Harbor on the north side of Cape Cod, one can anchor a boat at low tide and walk long stretches of sandy, rippled tidal flat. This gorgeous and well protected stretch of Cape coastline is the result of thousands of years of littoral drift, that began as swept sands collecting around a small nub.

The tide charts tell us when to set out to the tip and when to return. The sun tells us the time of day. And I wonder what these warm New England months would be like had I the luxury of designing my entire summer by tidal charts and sun... 

If I didn't pick up pen and paper all summer long... 

What I might be learning through a quiet, sunny osmosis of these slowed weeks without trying to analyze everything I absorb, like the restoration of St. Peter's Church in Osterville—where my husband and I were married—which includes a raising of the structure to accommodate a real foundation (so I was told by a construction worker, as I drove the children past the chapel that sits, teeters actually, alongside Nantucket Sound).

Photo courtesy of the Gallery--St. Peter's Church

Is everything significant?

I think not. But then, I wonder.

Along the intertidal zone at the crest of Sandy Neck, Max and his young cousin dig a trench and construct a hermit crab hotel. They muse over the small, leggy creatures, explaining that they need to protect the crabs, keep the family together. But they know when the tide shifts the crabs will scatter beyond the hotel, abandoning their fabricated home. They know, even, that as the crabs grow larger, they will eventually abandon their own borrowed shell in search of a roomier one. Yet Max and his cousin do their best to protect them while they can.

It is August. In three weeks the children will return to school and all the harried scheduling that goes along with the same. Summer is short and my boy and girl are getting older. The sands continue to spread. Many waters wait to be explored. And so...

For the next few weeks of this warm interval, I'm going to take a much needed sabbatical—a hiatus from the Friday Night Frolic and other self-imposed blogging demands—to explore more of New England, including what's here at home, with my ever growing children. It won't be long before they shed their shells and inhabit an alien framework. 

And while it may not be feasible to live by the sun, or even the moon, or the tide, and whatever they may bring, I think it may be viable (if not advisable) to utilize these remaining summer days, which have been so unusually beautiful—almost like days borrowed from a tropical land—for the purpose of shoring up the foundation, and enjoying the little muses while they are still little muses.

I'll be back, though, come late August—or sooner, as I'm sure to return to the grid periodically to see what's going on here and with you. Until then, my friends, enjoy this splendid summer.

* - Photo taken from my iPhone (yes, I dumped the android!).

Dance With Me

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique."

~Martha Graham

Lulu with Herci Marsden

A bit about Lulu: She is très, très, bien—really, quite well—and thanks All for your inquiries and good wishes. Well enough, she is, to be trying out for the dance team at a new school she'll be attending (where she'll be joining big bro) come late August.

Above, is a photo from a few summers back, when Lu participated in ballet boot camp with the Herci Marsden of The State Ballet of Rhode Island. In the late 1960s Ms. Marsden introduced dance to the University of Rhode Island (my alma mater—where I also danced for four years, à la Martha Graham, with URI's modern dance troupe), and at seventy-three years old, she can still work those legs at the bar.

Unlike Lu, who seemed to be entirely out of step during the performance that consummated two weeks of training. For every plié, she did a relevé. For every pas de chat, she made passé. If the dancers' feet were in second position, she was in fifth. I couldn't tell if she was running far behind or ahead, or just playing the opposites game.

See what I mean:

That's Lu without a leg up.

But she kept at it, giggling to herself, didn't leave the floor like she did when she was four, telling me (in almost so many words) the movements were too slow and constrained for her. Not surprisingly, as much as I wanted her to stick with ballet, with the exception of Marsden's soft-toed boot camp, she did not. And I understood this. Dance is an emotional and intuitive expression of life, and for Lu, ballet was all ball and chain, technique where she desired tempest.

Lu's been talking dance the past year or so—jazz, tap, hip hop—asking for lessons at a dance studio, which requires a big commitment, lots of dough, and comes with all the pecuniary trappings: myriad performances, caked on make-up, questionable costumes and grand competitions. Like traveling overseas to perform. Seriously. Seems the entire discipline has been commercialized.

And to that, I say Pooey.

But here we are, headed to a school with dance as an elective, and I can't deny her any longer (besides, it's included in the tuition!). Nor do I want to, for I know the girl needs to move, needs to spin, needs to let her heart spring from it's cage, expand, bounce, and exceed its own yearnings. 

Isn't that what we all need?

Well, maybe not the part that makes you dizzy.

We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive... and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. 
 ~D.H. Lawrence

Zen in the Art of Life

I don't remember the infraction, but she did follow the directive and wrote the sentence 110 times—the extra ten for good measure. Sometimes you have to do a thing that many times for it to sink in. (If you're really lucky, you don't.) It was an effective consequence. For a while. But as it is, my little muse will be who she will be. And it's alright. As we all do, the girl sometimes forgets.

I've been told that I'm forgetting my children. This by my children, of course. They seem to think they've been lost to my laptop. I don't think it's true. The culprit is my mind, and its incessant swoosh of words and phrases that pull me inward and freeze me in time. I need to rectify it, obviously. And though the kids are secure in my love for them, they also need to know that they have my respect.

And I'd like to show them this without writing it out longhand 110 times.

So this being school vacation week, I'm going to be taking a little hiatus, take my kids to the movies, cook some real meals for them, play some board games, and head up north, to the mountains, where we can shoot down the trails to our hearts' desire.

It was Ray Bradbury who said that one of the most important items in a writers makeup, what shapes his material and rushes him along the road, is to look to his zest, see to his gusto.*

Time to look to, and create, some of that zest and gusto with my babes.

I'll be back, though, for the Frolic on Friday. Until then, with much zest and gusto: So long and be well!



*Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury