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Sunday June 17, 2001
"Our time is not our own and perhaps we are glad of that. As if in filling it overfull, we could outsmart time's last trick, death. We think we are keeping ourselves from ambush, from letting someone else get ahead, and we may be right on one level, but we are also sealing ourselves off from the kind of miracle that appears only when we aren't working for its arrival." Mary Gordon in Waste, and Want Not...article in special Forbes ASAP edition on Time, November 30, 1998
don't park on the grass
stripping down
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father's day The phone rings. I've been dreaming but I'm jolted out of it. It's a little after eight. SuRu is back. I'm muttering excuses when I decide that I really have to make time for something slightly physical. I say I'll call back in a few and meet her around the corner. Outside in the street it is quiet still. A red bird flits across the street. One car, one bike, one jogger. We walk to the other side of the park. I start sweating, a little damp under the collar, before we are a block away. A house we have walked by many times, a house falling into ruins for a while, is being renovated. Windows and frames are taken out and propped in the yard, cedar shake siding ripped off. Inside the house and the attached workshop, there is junk. Shelves with boxes, papers, rolled up plans, exposed to the elements. It's as if someone new owns it and cares not for the contents, not even enough to throw it out. But they are restoring the structure. They have meticulously arranged the windows and some planks as if to reuse them. A few reels of recording tape and a target and other junk lie about in the yard. We speculate on the circumstances while giving the dogs a drink. Chalow is already tired and lies down, feet splayed, in the shade while we take this break. A bit later we see a car, parked on a lawn and covered with a huge tree limb that has fallen. We wonder why they parked a late model and seemingly operable car on a lawn anyway. Someone wanders by and says the car has been there for a while. But the tree is new. As any good flâneur will tell you, if you hit the ground and walk without purpose, you will see things in a new way and have a new idea of the world. We take the fathers to Westwood for the buffet brunch. Forrest's dad can't read the print on his new Book on Tape but I'm sure he'll enjoy some F. Scott Fitzgerald stories. Dad is happy with four Dick Francis paperbacks and new socks. We gave them these 5x7 pix of ourselves at some ball. Forrest's Mom said it wasn't a very good picture of us, that we looked old. I thought it was pretty good. But, heck, we are old. We are, um, 'in our early fifties.' Aging is so inevitable. But it happens slowly, slowly. When did I become unable to get up and down off the floor without pain and embarrassment? Mom and Dad are talking about going to Denver. You can see them twitching to get away. I'm instructed to water the yard, the plants, keep up with the mail. I give Dad some Dick Francis books on tapes to listen to on the trip and ask if there is anything else that they need for their trip. Home from the brunch, I get the house ready for guests. Usually this entails shoveling piles of newspapers and picking up stray shoes and coffee cups. I don't throw away a couple of feet of newspapers, convinced I'll look at them soon. Spent the afternoon watching Gayle put together an awesome cassoulet and a couple of rhubard, raspberry, pear pies. I was the sous-sous-sous which means that all I did was peal the pears and dice them and wash up utensils as they got used and gawk. A lovely meal emerged and some folks came over to watch Sex in the City and Six Feet Under and eat and drink some nice burgundy. It was fun. But where'd the weekend go? Where, I ask you? |
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