This ’n That

Back at home downloading pictures from the new little camera, one of the images made me wonder what Renoir would have made of the scene in The Trolley Bark Park on Adams Street earlier this evening.  One of my all-time favorite images isn’t a photograph but a painting… Renoir’s The Luncheon of the Boating Party in the Phillips Collection Gallery near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. It’s a big painting… so big it gets its own room.  That painting is about connectedness.  

I shot the first picture on my BLOG today from where Margaret and I were sitting on a Mexican blanket enjoying a salad supper we’d brought from home. When I look at the photograph, I wonder what it is that connects all those people. A Zydeco band is playing, the sun is setting, people are not exactly clustered but scattered in groups as small as two and as large as the dozen celebrating somebody’s birthday near where we were sitting… and they/we are all connected… from the table where Clyde is busy explaining and selling his Vibrant Soap all the way down to the long line at the ice cream truck to the half-dozen people dancing by the band stand… Most of us don’t know each other, but we have come together on a Friday evening for a picnic… for individual, separate picnics   

It’s the connectedness of things that fascinates me… today and every day.  How can I not wonder about the connection between the amazing sunflower I saw on Mississippi Avenue and the orchids on my back porch; and the connections between the patterns by deliberate design in Clyde’s Vibrant soaps and the fascinating deliberateness of the veins running through the leaf of the fiddle leaf fern growing by my front door;  and the connection between the abandoned or displaced child’s stuffed toy on the grass not far from our mailbox and the smashed icon on the back of the 1964 Ford Mustang… and the connection of those white onions with the dirt from the garden still on them with the wonderful soup Margaret makes.