Friday Joy (Sunday Edition)

For 24 years my morning commute has taken me past a racetrack. Occasionally, peeking over the freeway, I could see the horses on the track, or catch a delicious whiff of horse while sitting in otherwise urban traffic and listening to NPR.

Recently the track shut down, which is ok because I like horses more than racing. I embraced the end of an era by looking at the auction of racetrack assets, and surprised myself by not needing anything from it. I have wondered if there was anything to replace the track's impact. What sensory interruption would waken me during my drive? Fate has provided me a new joy -- a communal kitchen has popped up along the freeway. Several times a week, on that same drive, I now smell crisping garlic, even with my car windows closed.

That is my Friday joy.

Victor Vasarely and Gordon Onslow Ford

I was going to say that they made too much art, but they both lived to be 90, bless them.

Oleander

The prompt was to choose a piece of art and write about what it evokes. It was accompanied by the painting Oleander, by Vincent Van Gogh.

A woman in a tightly cinched shirtwaist dress prepares a martini for her husband at a campsite. With the shiny Airstream behind her and martini shaker in the foreground, she is somehow steady-footed in her kitten heels. She takes an oleander leaf, breaks it in half, and adds it to the ingredients. 

The husband dies.

Oleanders mainly evoke long car trips with my parents in the navy blue 1965 Oldsmobile Cutlass. No air conditioning, windows opening, listening to the baseball broadcast on the radio and wondering why the oleanders in the median, pink, white and red, have no rhythm to the planting pattern. I’ve come to appreciate them over the years and would like some of my own to plant in the barren island that divides us from the neighbors. Plumbago has largely taken over the role of oleander these days, brightening with a slightly dusty blue and thrusting itself unreservedly up hillsides along the freeway. It is no oleander.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Oleanders is a rare painting of his that I like. The composition is delicious, accentuating the counterpoint of the flower to the leaf, using the leaves separately to direct the eye and give shape. It is not this way in nature. In this way it is two works of art, the arrangement and the painting itself.

Update: Oleander in the wild (or at least in the back of the storage facility).

PS

My three favorite parts of the Van Gogh Museum:

1) The artist’s paints and palettes

2) An exhibit dedicated to his use of new pigments to achieve certain looks (and how those pigments have faded)

3) A gallery that showed the works of his schoolmates

PPS I lost the name of the movie where the woman kills her husband...

Storage Peace

As opposed to Storage Wars.

Oldest nephew and I have been tackling the job of emptying my mom's storage space and trying to get other people to take things. It's a nice excuse to hang out and I could not do this without him. It has to be done.

Storage spaces are a rip. I know that many of the items in the space are valuable, but I estimate that we have spent 7 grand on the space since we moved mom two years ago. That's real money. And by now those items, even if sold, could not make up for it. Plus I'd have to do the work. No way, man.

So far we have met once at the house to look at items and add numbers to the boxes and boxes to the spreadsheet. We met twice to look into every box and add numbers to boxes that didn't have them. And yesterday we met to go over the last boxes and take stuff to Goodwill and the dump. The taking and dumping is being done by my nephew, not me.

Everything on the left and the right in this photo is now permanently dealt with. 

And as luck would have it, friends from work are outfitting their rental and need some house stuff. They were able to come take a look at everything. In the photo above, they're walking in with my nephew. Why? Because I got distracted while looking for photos on my laptop and noticed that I'd entered my mom's name incorrectly in her cremation order (which she still does not need) and I was correcting that mistake on the phone while waiting for our friends to get there, so neph went downstairs to retrieve them. Note that I decided to remove the people in this photo without reading the instructions on how to use Photoshop's content-aware tool. 

I was left with something more like Nudes Descending a Staircase With Disembodied Arm Held Aloft in Greeting. I kinda like it.

The friends walked out with a bunch of kitchen stuff, a vintage hamper, my grandmother's art deco stew pot, a big old television -- and let me know that they have people who will take the linens if we need someone to. Muuuch appreciated.

Several big loads down the quirky elevator later, the neph's enormous Honda Pilot was filled with boxes. Only one thing was rejected by the dump -- his stepdad's desktop copy machine. Considering, this is fabulous. Things are seeming so much more manageable, and it's only the 8th of September. Other relatives are planning a pilgrimage for later in the month in which they will come take what they like.

The Cat Report

The big boy is sleeping with his head on my shoulder and purring. He has not bitten his paw since we let him out of the cone. He is impossibly soft and not smelly. All systems go.

He is paying an inordinate amount of attention to me. This is new. And when we are not together he often sleeps on the arm of the sofa where I usually sit. This is where I found him when I returned from the movies last night.

So good.

Friday Joy On Sunday

I am in a fb group where we share a Friday joy. There are some joys that I can't share there because I don't think that people would like my version of joy. So here are some of the week's joys:

-- A guy at work wanted to know whether the archives wanted his old arm cast that had some significant signatures and scrawling on it. I thought it was hilarious. Brought the idea to the team (we were in the middle of mediating a water issue that had happened over the weekend) and they were all super grossed out. It would be inappropriate to bring it into the archives because casts are filled with skin cells and those, in turn, draw insects. I know this, but would have figured out a display container that would have worked.

Anyhoo the responses from my colleagues were so specific to each of them that it filled me with joy, even as they rejected the possibility that this was a cool item. And then we shared gross out stories. My idea of a good time.

Did I ever tell the story of how I lost my eyebrow? I got smacked in the face with a baseball while we were playing "pickle" in the middle of the street. Two weeks later I was scratching my itchy eyebrow while watching The Brady Bunch and I lifted its crispy corner. Then I loosened the whole thing and it was a little blonde caterpillar in the palm of my hand. I ran to my sister's room and asked her to tell me it was going to be ok. She put some Vaseline on my bald face and promised / lied that it was going to grow back. I put the eyebrow in my special box of keepsakes and it would still be there if she didn't make me throw it away.

Other Friday joys? Our yellow ginger is blooming and it smells just like the the perfume at the ABC Store.

And I have recently noticed and have appreciated the phrase "And you as well". You wish someone a nice weekend, and in response they say "And you as well." I like this, and have noticed the young people using it around me. Perhaps I will incorporate it into my daily speech.

Developing.

Also, the big black cat would like you to know that I am a jerk. He has been wearing the cone for months now, as we battled his paw cancer, or whatever it was. His paw is healed now, and he was so dirty and unable to properly wash his parts, and he did a sit-and-spin in the cat box this morning. I already washed his bottom after that, so when mrguy and I came home from his and hers mani-pedis (for real!) I prepared a nice warm kitchen sink for him. He has not savaged his right paw, and I think we're going to give it a try without the cone. So far he's being a very good boy. Washing himself in a patch of sun and using his right paw as a paw, not a meal.