Weblog 180

July 19, 2009~ 12:00am
One hundred and eighty weeks I've been blogging in here. Hard to believe it's that long.

Time's dials spin faster and faster with the years...whether we're mindful of it or not, it continues to zoom past, the changes barely perceptible, but things do change and degrade, grow weaker and dimmer. The whirling red girl, youth ablaze in her



spins slower and slower, even as time speeds up. Soon, there are only traces of the red girl glowing, but distorted. The things that change in us are hard to pinpoint as they are slipping away, but soon we're left with only highlights...suggestions of what was there.



You can make out a sort of smile, a tentative wave, becoming fainter and fainter as the calendar turns its pages. Maybe the white lady is left. The ghost. The will-o-the-wisp... her secrets part of a murmurous wind that becomes restless at times and with every passing year, the voice grows fainter. Harder to hear. (Yes. It's been another doleful week, can you tell? LOL!) A lot of folks get maudlin and melancholy with the fall, but that's when I awaken-- the cool air reviving me. Summer's heat oppresses....I feel trapped in it. Alone in my doldrums with time itself stuck to a sticky clock that only turns backwards, and sourly.

The one bright spot- (well, two. I saw my grandchildren today, who fall over themselves with happiness when I'm walking up to their door as they beg for stories.) And I tell them, fractured and comically half-remembered. Today it was 'The Snow Queen' and 'The Red Shoes'.

We sit at the picnic table and they munch, their eyes big with "And then what happens?"-- peering out at me, enthralled, while we're eating our pizza.

And today there was a RAINBOW after a quick drenching, and that was quite wonderful. So unexpected. It made me feel good. (So naturally, we quickly became leprechauns, searching the backyard for the pot of gold and all the while, their big standard poodle was bumping my butt-- his new throw-toy in his mouth, wanting to play too.) Yes, it was a lovely evening. Too often I forget the very real treasures that are mine. I spend far too much time alone and thinking....brooding, really, and it's not good for me, though I have no remedy for it.

The other bright spot was an email exchange on Friday between Wayne and myself, on the delightful subject of Groucho Marx. Wayne had sent this little snippet that just tickled me.

"The exaggerated walk, with one hand on the small of his back and his torso bent almost 90 degrees at the waist was a parody of a fad from the 1880s and 1890s. Then, fashionable young men of the upper classes would affect a walk with their right hand held fast to the base of their spines, and with a slight lean forward at the waist and a very slight twist toward the right with the left shoulder, allowing the left hand to swing free with the gait. Edmund Morris, in his biography of President Roosevelt The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt describes a young TR, newly elected to the State Assembly, walking into the House Chamber for the first time in this trendy, affected gait, somewhat to the amusement of the older and more rural Members who were present. Groucho exaggerated this fad to a marked degree, and the comedy effect was enhanced by how out of date the fashion was by the 1920s and 30s."

I can see him right now, bent at the waist, those fabulously mobile eyebrows dancing on his forehead, the ever-present cigar.....



LOL!!! He was one of a kind. Wayne sent me this as well, a story that is absolutely priceless

"The late comedian Groucho Marx, famous for his quick wit, performed some of his best work in 1958 on a pile of East Berlin rubble for an audience of five.

Among the five was Judith Dwan Hallet, then 16 and the daughter of Robert Dwan, the long-time director of Groucho's radio and TV shows. She and her father, along with Marx's wife and 11-year-old daughter, had accompanied him on the tour of Europe. In Dornum, the German town where Marx's mother had been born, the travelers discovered that the Nazis had obliterated all Jewish graves, and removed from the local church the old register of inhabitants from his parents' generation. Marx hired a car with a chauffeur, and told the driver to take the group to Adolph Hitler's grave in Berlin.

It was surprisingly easy to get there. The car slipped through a checkpoint into a devastated gray and brown city of people in solemn clothing. Marx told the chauffer to drive to the bunker where Hitler was said to have committed suicide, where he was supposedly still buried.

The rubble at the site was about 20 feet high. Wearing his characteristic beret but without the trademark cigar, Marx alone climbed the side of the debris. When he reached the top, he stood still for a moment. Then he launched himself, unsmiling, into a frenetic Charleston. The dance on Hitler's grave lasted a minute or two."

What a great story! It brought dance music to an otherwise bland Friday at work. Groucho is a 'pick-me-up' any day of the week.

And grandchildren. Groucho and grandchildren. Those are the things that sustain me, coaxing smiles and laughter from a heart caught in ennui. These small delights. These are the worthwhiles, and I cherish them.




July 20, 2009~ 6:00pm
OK, I'll admit it. Something this week tells me I'd be happier in a place less cluttered. I honest to god want to move right into an Ikea catalog... and live there. Sometimes it feels like the stuff I have piled all around me is hampering my very thought processes and leading me to muddied, murky thinking. For instance....just take a gander at this wondrous thing!



I WANT IT!!!



Look how economical the space- the clean lines, how inviting and OPEN it is! Made by the Japanese, not the Danes. (Their small island with its crush of population force the Japanese to trick space into giving all it's got.)



And folded up, restacked, it's a WORK OF ART. Oh my! I just love this thing to death. On a cluttered-mind day, there's nothing like looking at creative inventions with simplicity at the core to brighten my spirits. Oh oh....I do want one of these marvelous pods! It looks kind of "70's", doesn't it? LOL!!

I remember my first apartment as a new bride in 1972...white formica small round breakfast table with four white molded chairs that sort of looked like mushrooms...and a modern sculpture in the center of two ovoid heads - one male, one female - curving into one another. (Remember those?) Those were the days.

Pullman kitchen... Pillsbury Doughboy on the range that I'd saved labels and sent for in the mail (and that melted because I didn't remove it while cooking....Yep. Still don't know my way around a kitchen) but I do reminisce about those Space Age furnishings. BARBARELLA!!

'Kitchen-Barbarella'....that was me. :)





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