It's time for the annual home vacation - five days off spent in the luxury of primetime Northern Hemisphere weather. The official beer of the home vacation is Corona (light & summery). The official CD is Jimmy Buffet's Greatest Hits...
The tomatoes are coming in waves, almost too many to even give away. It's the consolation of the end of summer and the only good thing that reverses the scarcity principle - there is no end of them while they have their head. The vines have grown so fecund that harvesting becomes something akin to an Easter egg hunt. Earlier in the season there is a different, if less satisfying harvest: I rub their aromatic fronds and inhale the smell.But now the air is scented by newly laid mulch, still regnant under my fingernails and on my clothes. I briefly ponder whether the modern wonder of bleach will return my clothes to presentability. Bass wind chimes chime in, sounding like church bells. Yesterday I'd heard bells playing church hymns while on the bike path, presumably coming from a cemetery just beyond it's end.
Now the sun has dipped between the large leaves of the sycamore, leaving only diamond splashes created by slight rustles of wind. It makes its way slowly through the leaves, in a northern direction, like a Windows progress bar, a natural time increment.
Eyes above: there are "people in the sky" as Bill Luse aptly puts it. I share his incredulity. A tube of steel carries a bunch of people in arranged aisle ways thousands of feet above me. The jet leaves twin white streaks like a speed boat on the Okeechobee. Just to the west I see either a UFO, or maybe a small black balloon. I report, you decide.
I feel all "Belloc-y" after a few beers, alive to the natural world and capable of delusions of grandeur. "Everything I learned about God, I learned from alcohol" is untrue but sounds good after a couple of beers. Our ancestors must've thought so giving whiskey a name meaning "water of life" and calling drink "spirits". The only thing I recall from my Driver's Education class is how the instructor insisted we not drink and drive but also pointed out that if you're drunk you stand a much better chance of surviving an accident because you go with the flow, you don't resist or retract in fear. There could be a metaphor in there somewhere. (Reminds me of Homer Simpson's famous line about alcohol being the cause and solution of all life's problems.)
"Spahn and Sain and pray for rain" goes the elegant baseball aphorism; less elegantly I think, "Beer and books and pray for more vacation time."
Speaking of drinking and leisure time, let us ponder, a moment, this selection from Walter Kerr's "The Decline of Pleasure":
I would like to consider, briefly, a man I know. This man lives in the suburbs, earns a satisfactory salary in an investment house, is educated and intelligent, gets along well with his wife and three children, has his evenings and Saturdays and Sundays at his disposal, and possesses many of machines invented to assure him of leisure and pleasure. For a while, several years ago, he developed a surprising habit; perhaps I should say he developed a habit that is not at all uncommon among twentieth-century middle-to-upper-class men but that was surprising at the time to his family. Three or four times a year, in a rhythm too erratic to be easily understood, he would lose himself for a long weekend in a succession of bars. These periods of escape did not seem to be related to domestic crises or office tensions; they did not spill over into Monday mornings but were cut off sharply and quite soon enough to enable him to return to work; the classic symptoms of an incipient alcoholism -- self-pity, indifference to family, fear of faltering in a career -- were nowhere in evidence. The problem was not acute, but a problem existed.
The problem was ultimately solved, as it is now so often solved, by the purchase of one more machine for the home. This man bought himself a power saw and installed it in his basement. Certain supplementary tools were added a little later. With his new equipment, the essentially responsible husband and father transformed a rather dingy room that had been used for laundering into a pine-paneled breakfast nook, which is both charming and useful. Having completed the task, he transferred his attention to an unfinished attic...an outdoor terrace.
[His] drinking bouts have ceased...He does not look particularly well. He seems tired. It is not unreasonable that he should be tired. He is now working five days at the office and two days and five nights at home...Still he goes on, content to have been rescued from his aberration.
Summer is a gateway drug, a mild hallucinogenic. I run like Olympian Emil Zapotec down the asphalt to U2's "With or Without You" and that "End of the World As We Know It" song. Friday music is....Friday music.
Afterwards the back patio becomes a second skin and I'm surprised by the cramming of so much beauty in such a modest suburban space. Flowers hover suspended in air. The regal crowns of the fence post stand like heraldic knights, and the dapper sash across the gates seems to signal some sort of hierarchical pride. The pavers are hot to the heel and Spanish in appearance. Wild sunflower stand with astonishing height and a few fireflies stand athwart Time yelling "Stop!" to no avail. Queen Anne's lace dot the tree line. A little moat of stones, a micro "Great Wall of China", demarcks the dark mulch from the grass.
I could stare for hours at the scene, as I might at Christmas lights given the right environment.
The sun dapples the pine and sets the fence at half-mast. Trees wave pedestrianly, like horses moseying. The world briefly stops, the days cast away their rock-ruttedness. Welcome to Havana, Ohio.
Whatever I might change I would not change, since they satisfy the designer, in this case my wife assisting the Almighty with her landscaping skills. It was a somewhat foreign concept to my younger self to find pleasure in another's pleasure but now sometimes I get it. If she likes it, I like it derivatively.
On the reading front...The latest New Yorker absorbs my attention only for a single ad (displayed in this post). Daedalus commands our attention with his single eye. Sometimes less is more, like less work and more vacation.
I also ponder Heather King's delight in writing. Based on "Redeemed", I find her stuff full of self-revelation and piquancies but not the least self-indulgent or non-utilitarian (do not only justice and mercy kiss in Heaven but also anti-utilitarianism and helpfulness to others?)
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