Peonies

This is what happens.  I'm poring over allium and flox and thinking about English gardens and all I can see is this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like a great heffalump.  

Briar, who is a dead ringer for the dog in the Black Dog catalog (sans tail) lies next to me.  She understands that if we didn't live in California, we'd have a great big garden full of peonies in vivid rose and raspberry sundae and great groves of helleborus in green and ivory and burgundy.

The more bees

The more bees are disappearing, the more I find images of them in almost every newspaper, decorating stories on the Chelsea Flower show, for example.  I love that this image appears to be almost computer-generated.

In almost every picture

I picked up a book by erik kessels/marion blomeyer - "in almost every picture" - photographs of a beloved family dalmatian in all kinds of exotic places:

 

 I should add to this.  I've just looked at the book again.  There is a wonderful quality to these pictures, a nostalgia from the age in which they were taken, the texture of the film, of course, but also that the dog becomes front and center of each picture, whether it be at a little Greek taverna, or wading in the shallows, or sitting under a flowering tree in the garden.  My favorite is an image of the dog in its mistress's arms at the dining room table on what appears to be Christmas.

Apparently the author found these photos at a flea market in Spain, and decided to do them justice by publishing them.  They're quite moving.  And I say that not just because I'm besotted with my Dotsie. 

Hamlet, Roman architecture & butter

Say what you will, but I don't think that four pieces of ciabatta toast with english butter and honey is excessive on a morning when you've run a couple of miles on the treadmill while watching your husband sweat on his bike beside you, glancing too the hunting habits of the Chinese snow leopard in vivid High Definition.

I have been humbled.  I've thought about this a lot and the only words I have for it are humbled, by my son's eleventh grade Hamlet night - a performance collage inspired by Hamlet.  I am loathe to go to these things and do so with much eye-rolling and expecting it frankly to be crap, but I was truly amazed by the level of creativity & humor shown by the students.  There was visual art, theatre, poetry, hip-hop performance, jazz saxaphone, comedy, ballet... and all of it good, solid work.  Moreover, and maybe this is stating the most obvious, I realized that he was part of a community, a big, warm creative community of people all absolutely engaged.  Yes, it is one of those warm and fuzzy moments when you realize that your child has a life outside of the home, outside of his immediate family, in the big wide world.  Sigh.

Another echelon of creativity was reached this morning at Minky's Museum Day, which is a huge exhibit of the sixth grade's Archaeology project that they've been focusing on this semester.  I'm afraid the Roman Baths in Bath took somewhat of a nosedive yesterday when someone trip over them resulting in something that looked like an earthquake or the eruption of Mt Etna. The questionable columns fell, the roof caved, and all that was left was the sparkling silver pool.  My favorite was a stunning example of roman architecture created entirely from different kinds of pasta (imagine the sturdy walls you can make with lasagne, the columns created from fusili, the spaghetti fences).  I rather enjoyed the self-referential nature of the project too, even though Mr Webster assures Minks that pasta is a relatively modern Italian invention.  Anwyay, Emily, the pasta-architect genius behind this particular model, had managed to cover the stuff in a doughie substance so it almost appeared to be rendered.  Unbelievable.  It took all the will-power I could muster not to drive home and immediately raid my larder and the crafts drawer to challenge myself similarly.

I don't like to be mean.  I am mean, I know.  But it's not a quality in myself that I like enormously.  And I particularly dislike people who are unkind to people that they consider less than themselves, such as waiters, valet parkers, gardeners and cleaning ladies.  I have always gone out of my way to be respectful of everyone (except of course agents, lawyers and a**hole film directors, and anyone who talks loudly on a cell phone in a restaurant and people who are nasty to their children, oh, and people who don't like dogs) but, and I don't know why, Monica, my lovely cleaning lady, who is very young and has just come back from her week-long honeymoon in San Francisco, annoys me so much that I can hardly bear to be in the same room with her. I know she means well.  I know she's a few sandwiches short of a picnic.  I know that even though she says she wants to be a doctor, that is what I like to call a "pipe dream".  What irritates me is that she is slow and not even that meticulous.  She is painstakingly slow.  Even the size of her bottom doesn't annoy me.  To be honest, I'm sure I'm a little jealous of her J-Lo bottom.  (To be fair, hers is about three times the size of J-Lo's).   I have just sent the following email to my friend E and because it is still STILL annoying me, I am sharing it here.  I am sure God will strike me down.  And I can still hear Maureen's voice in my head, "Oh she's LOVELY, you are NICE to her aren't you?"  Yes Maureen, I am, honestly.  Most of the time.  Most of the time we get on well, especially when we work side by side, like when we were making brochettes for Jumby's birthday supper, we laughed and we chatted like old friends.  Anyway, witness:

I've never seen anyone unloading a dishwater in five steps before.  Step one, take out one glass. Step two, take out one more glass.  Step three, arrange one glass inside the other on the counter.  Step four, repeat steps one and two.  Step five, carry one (not three or four) glasses to the cupboard and place it in its proper place. Step six, repeat with each plate, glass, etc, never carrying more than one at a time. 

But the worst thing is, she scraped as much soft butter as she could from a pack I had out on the counter, meticulously and painstakingly of course, into a small china bowl and then threw the rest away -- a good quarter of a pound of it.  I fished it out of the trash and threw it back in the fridge as if I were a housewife during the war on rations.

I wish there was a cure for acute irritation.  Like Benadryl for the soul or something.

I do truly despise this bourgeois trait in myself.  At times like these, I wonder what my grandmother would do. One imagines she'd do something clever and witty and it would all be solved.  I've done what you're supposed to do with small children.  Removed myself.  I'm having a time out in the garden with my laptop, the dogs, and the soothing sound of running water.

Love After Love

Kuan Yin making waves

A feng shui garden at the Chelsea flower show is causing enormous controversy, primarily, it seems, because a dragon has been placed facing north rather than east and a Kuan Yin has been labelled 'Buddha' in Chinese.  I just rather liked the image:

Q
QT is in Cannes with Death Proof (the newly edited version including the famous lapdance scene) and the papers can hardly contain themselves.  How cute is he here?

we are the champions

I have visions of Mrs Toad in my head - dressed in pale green and bulging precariously.  It's vicious I know.  But at least I didn't run her down, which I wanted to, badly.  Dreadful, dreadful woman.  Dreadful.

The Mo' Shea girls rule supreme - there is a jumper Champion and a children's hunter champion now in our family, and you can guess which is which.  Fred won two firsts yesterday, after getting over a mild bout of colic on Friday and having to suffer through the humiliation of Dr Gray's arm up his bottom and about three feet of plastic tubing down his nose into his stomach to "lubricate" him.   The horse amazes me. J put Minky to bed last night and she said to him, "Your daughter is a champion."

 

 

On this day.....

21 May. In 1921 a frog fall during a thunderstorm in Gibraltar covered the north of the colony with thousands of little amphibians. Frogs are the most common animal to fall from the sky mysteriously; such falls have been registered regularly since Pliny and the Annamese historical almanacs. Athenaeus, in The Deipnosophists (4th century AD) , records a frog fall in Greece so serious that the roads were blocked, people were unable to open their front doors and the town stank for weeks. There are records of hundreds of frog falls in the last 200 years.

-- Fortean Times 

 

Passion flower

Treasure flower

Quote of the Day

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung" 

 

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

 

Or in other words, really silly things sometimes sound beautiful when set to music.   

 

Saint of the Day: St. Theodotus(AD 303)

"When GK Chesterton wrote

'The righteous minds of innkeepers

Induce them now and then

To crack a bottle with a friend

Or treat unmoneyed me,'

he could have been referring to St. Theodotus." 

May 18 is apparently the feast day for saint and vintner St Theodotus who liked to nourish both the soul and the body apparently. 

Da bon bon bon

Just because there is a show this weekend, I have to include this little photo from Flintridge of Minks and Bonnie. 

Froozjen Gladje and I practised in the Equidome yesterday.  Lisa rather devilishly put the jumps up to what looked like four feet and although we sailed around (literally, weeeeeeeeeeeeee!) it did prove to me that I would probably scare myself to death doing the jumpers at that height after a year of nice sedate 3'3" medal classes.  But wow, what a rush! 

Friends, Romans

This was going to be a very positive post on a grey Friday morning but my computer has taken so long to boot up to this page that I stupidly took an annoying sales call from someone asking for Tow-Vay.  I should know better and just hang up immediately.  He annoyingly asked how to pronounce it and I thought to myself, why should I tell you, I don't even know you you are, it's the equivalent of a stranger walking in through my front door and then asking where he is.  I've often thought of changing my name to Elizabeth or Lavinia or Holly or something to make life easier.  One weird name is one thing, two is just a travesty.

I was going to say that it's the kind of grey morning that usually sends me spiralling into melancholy and histrionic misery but no!  Today, driving Minky and her ginormous representation of the roman baths in Bath to school, complete with mosaic tile and sequined pool and Ionic columns (who knew???), I listened the the new-ish Yusuf Islam album (Cat me old mate) which is sublime.  Some klunkers, a few naff numbers but basically, bloody brilliant.  We sang along into our makeshift microphones, as is our wont, on Laurel Canyon, not really caring what anyone else thought.

Minks and I finished cooking her ancient roman profiteroles masquerading as rock cakes (take your pick, Aunt Sally!), thirty eight of the little ricotta and flour buggers, each resting easily on a half bay leaf.  The recipe called for a weighted brick to be lain on them but all I had was the pizza stone and I could just imagine picking gluey burnt dough off the bottom of it for days after (I just got an email with the subject line: Sangiovese with Soul.  I kid you not.)  She will apparently half them (if the knife is strong enough) and drizzle them with mellis purus (honey) at school for her ravenous class to share.  We then moved on to the roman baths discovering a little late, thanks to the sardonic wit of her brother, that we'd gotten the wrong bloody columns.  "Never mind" I said in the most soothing voice I could muster "you'll definitely get points for creativity."  I gazed at the shimmering sea of large round sequins that any drag queen worth her salt would die for, and thought to myself, Bath would be happy to have half the glamour of this little maquette.  Next, an essay on the significance of the recent discovery of Herod's (yes that Herod) sarcophagus.  I went through every book in the house (including Gibson's The Decline of the Roman Empire for God's sake) searching for articles to back up her theories and found that we have quite an envious collection of reference books, including the New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, which is just about on my level.  To add to this mayhem, our printer will only print in ANY COLOR OTHER THAN BLACK so all essays came out in a rainbow of shades, just to keep the teacher guessing.  I crawled into bed exhausted at 11 wishing that I hadn't chosen this particular week to give up wine.

 

 

my blueberry nights
It's the first year that I read reports from Cannes, look at pictures from Jeffrey Well's blog of a dinner at Le Pizza, read Anne Thompson's coverage from the Croisette and feel just a tiny twinge of nostalgia.  Not for the early mornings, late nights, too many cigarettes and barely being able to keep your eyes open, but for the camaraderie.  I'm sad to see that Wong Kar-Wei's film isn't getting the best reviews; I have such a soft spot for his work.  James' film is managing to stay below the radar as he arguably the only non-celebrity American filmmaker to have a picture at the festival.  This will, I believe, bode well for him.  As long as Manohla is nice.  According to John Horn's piece in the LA Times today, Wahlberg isn't going because Cuban's company 2929 refuses to pay for him and his entourage to stay at the Du Cap.  (They said he and a couple of assistants would be okay).  The Du Cap is fine as long as you don't have one of those awful rooms at the top of the stairs, over the bar, where you're kept up all night long, because every single party always, without fail, ends up in the bar of the Du Cap.  Bellinis all round and all that.  The best thing, when you're totally exhausted and it's near the end of the festival, and the studio is paying for your stay, is to find a girlfriend and avail yourself of the absolutely delicious buffet lunch down by the sea.  The Du Cap's lunch -- sardines and tomatoes and buffala mozarella and coeurs du palmiers and fresh white asparagus and marinaded mushrooms and cold mussells,  with that amazing french bread and butter, is just delicious, especially when you are functioning on three hours' sleep.

Maddie
The Madeleine McCann drama continues.  I can't bear to see the mother fading away in front of our eyes.  As I said to someone, one would almost prefer death over this hideous vacuum of not knowing.  As my friend Vivi puts it:

"I agree that it's hard to think about anything else than Madeleine - I spent most of last week bursting into tears about it all - it was just so horrendous thinking of this sweet girl asking whoever took her when she would  see her mother again - the imagination runs riot, and every scenario  seems so bleak.  Praia de Luz Mark Warner is where we spent two weeks last summer; we had lunch every day at the Tapas restaurant where Maddie's parents were having dinner when she disappeared.  It's just too strange seeing all the familiar footage of the town, and the church which we walked past every day to get to the beach - the sunny summer holidayishness of it such a cruel travesty.  We are going back there in July - booked it months ago, and it seems quite wrong somehow - I mean will they all still be there?"

Mental

Just when I thought it was time to stop taking the antidepressant meds (after all, what do I have to be depressed about) and forgot to pick up my new prescription, leaving me for three days without a dose, this morning was about the most hideous I remember.  I did not want to get up, felt alternately angry and sorry for myself,  and just bleak house and realized that it was time to drive toot-sweet to Rite Aid on Sunset.  There was a great piece in, I think, the Times magazine about a guy who weaned himself off his meds because his situation changed, and how cathartic it was for him, how he cried at a film for the first time and so on.  Of course I become completely charged up and gungho.  Yes! I can do that.  No, I can't.  That's the sweet thing about anti-depressants -- you really don't notice them at all until they're gone.  It's a bit sad, depending on anything like that.  I'm better now. Thank God.  I can't remember the last time I was utterly useless for a few hours.

Jerry Fallwell died yesterday and today Terry Gross replayed an interview she'd done with him a few years ago.  He seemed pretty reasonable, despite his anti-everything that ain't fundamentalist Christian position.  He grew up with an agnostic father who in turn had grown up with an atheist father and he spoke of the rich spiritual element that was missing in his life.  Isn't it funny how children rebel?  And thus was born the Moral Majority a movement which got Reagan into power and has helped both Bushes since.  A movement, I believe that has done more to harm Christianity than anything else.  A movement, I fear, that has actually made people ashamed of their faith.  But you can't call him evil.  Just a poor, misguided sod.  He took it one step too far.  Maybe three.

I've spent too much of every day out with Coaster, the horse that J wants to rename Timmy or Caspar or something.  I love the name Coaster; it's dorky as hell but it suits him.  He always seems very happy to see me and loves all the attention and the grooming and the baths.  It's very peaceful at Lisa's house. Just me, the dogs and all of her horses standing in their little pipe corrals in the sun and the occasional crow or hawk overhead.  And the peacock next door. He's quite gorgeous and roosts in the big pine tree at night, his enormous tail cascading down.

N is working very hard and getting incredible results at school.  Something happened, an electrical sizzle in his head, something.  But he's firing on all cylinders AND thrilled about it.  I stand back and watch him, trying hard to tamp down my overblown, motherly pride.  Oy. 

 

Country Walks Can Reduce Depression

So my mother was right afterall when she said, "Just go for a long walk on the common."  This is from today's Independent:

Country walks can help reduce depression and raise self-esteem according to research published today, leading to calls for "ecotherapy" to become a recognised treatment for people with mental health problems.

Ecotherapy: the green agenda for mental health is the first study looking at how "green" exercise specifically affects those suffering from depression.

According to Mind, England and Wales's leading mental health charity, it produced "startling" results proving the need for ecotherapy to be considered a proper treatment option.

 

Brandon Adam

This is Mary's grandson, Brandon.  He is the kid on the right.  Mary owns Foothill Saddlery and once took in Briar at the Hansen Dam horse show because the steward forbade me from having her there.  Since then, we've been fast friends.  Her grandson is 21 and in Iraq.

 

And here is yesterday's Mother's Day editorial from the Bonner County Daily Bee:

 

This war keeps getting closer to home front
Posted: Sunday, May 13, 2007 - 01:42:03 pm PDT

The Iraqi war came home to Sandpoint this week.

Sgt. Brandon Adam, a 2003 Sandpoint High School, lost both legs in a roadside bombing last Saturday.

The 21-year-old had no pulse and had lost half of his supply of blood when help arrived.

He is now at Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. He underwent surgery last Tuesday and has started 12 to 18 months of therapy as well as bring fitted for prosthesis.

Adam isn't the first local soldier to get hurt or die in this conflict. He definitely isn't the only native injured or killed in the many wars this country has seen.

His injury struck a chord with Bee readers.

Predictably "Bush bashing" was mentioned often around local coffee shops. Reminders of why the United States was pulled into this war also came up on the Bee Webblog.

It's vitally important to remember this country was founded and continues to be the envy of the world because of the call to duty of many soldiers like Sgt. Adam.

This is not his war, this is the country's war as mandated by the Commander in Chief.

A person is entitled to hate this war all he or she wants but it is high time for us all to remember the growing number of fatalities and injuries coming from Iraq impact someone.

Let history write the war as only history can do. For the time being, let's pause and thank God Brandon Adam is alive and that this country continues to be defended by people like him.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Doug and Karen Adam on this Mother's Day. I have to believe, Karen has her best Mother's Day present ever -- her soldier son is alive.

--David Keyes is the publisher of the Daily Bee.