INTRODUCING ELIZABETH JADE

Five Days Old

Someone asked me today why it is that I find the bark of trees to be interesting, worth photographing, worth studying. Rather than say again what I have said about bark in past blog writing, I said I thought maybe the reason is that tree bark is visually enigmatic, and I am challenged to find meaning in obscurity. I wasn’t certain it was a good answer, but that’s the way it is with enigmas. 

On my bicycle ride later, as I watched a big cloud moving in the direction of home, where I was going, I remembered a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and thought I could have given it as answer to the question about why I am interested in making pictures of bark.  In the play when two of Hamlet’s old friends from school show up unexpectedly, he asks them why they have come “to prison hither.”  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern want to know what he means by prison. Hamlet says Denmark is a prison. Rosencrantz asks, “Then is the world a prison?” After a bit of banter Hamlet says “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it (Denmark) is a prison.”  When I was about five minutes from home, the heavens opened (as Shakespeare would have said) and I got wet.  After I put my bike away and got into dry clothes, I read Act 2, Scene 2 of hamlet and found that it would have been a good response to the question about why I like bark.

IN PRAISE OF STRANGE BEAUTY

Erythrina...  I don’t know what kind of erythrina this tree is, but I know it is one.  It’s blooming now in Balboa Park on the east side of Park Boulevard near the cactus garden.  On the other side of the park some erythrinas are red; I’ve found a picture in a book that identifies those as African coral trees. The cluster of blossoms in the first picture is about six inches across.

Click on a picture to see it larger.

Margaret and I have spent some time in England’s Lake Country,  and today I was reminded of a visit to William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage at Grassmere. In San Diego we have a bay, and we have hills, and today we have clouds; so I was about to say I wandered lonely as a cloud; but that’s already been said and somehow the words don’t describe what happens when I go out on my bicycle from our place above Mission Valley... even on a brilliant day like today... and besides we don’t have daffodils.

What we do have are brilliant yellow flowers springing up from clover, and if I squint from a distance and turn my imagination loose, the great spreads of yellow on our hillside at this time of year almost do for me what the daffodils on the hills around Lake Windermere did for Wordsworth when he wandered from Dove Cottage at Grassmere down along the water’s edge.

Sitting down to write something to go with the photographs I found in my “out and about” time today, the word serendipity came to mind; so I went in search of the word’s etymology.  Here’s what I found:  The first noted use of the word in the English language was in a letter to Horace Mann by Horace Walpole.  Most people know Mann as the “father” of the American effort to provide free education for everybody, and only the few people who had an English teacher like me who put The Castle of Otranto  on a reading list might have a reason to know the Aristocratic British philosopher and author Horace Walpole.  Walpole said he formed the word serendipity from the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip,” whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic  Sarandib, which was adopted from Tamil “Seren Deevu” or originally from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa which literally translates to “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island.  What I did today and what happens to me often when I go out into the world to see what I can see fits Walpole’s description of the people who make discoveries by accident of things they weren’t looking for.

This morning I noticed, for instance, that the shadow of the nozzle from the gas pump at Costco to my car’s gas tank looked like some strange mythical animal feeding.  The shadow the ground was irresistible, so I shot the picture with my cell phone.  On my bicycle ride later I stopped and watched an encounter between two policemen and a homeless man stopped on the sidewalk beside University Avenue in Hillcrest.  Apparently his cart overloaded with what I presume were all of his worldly possessions was somehow out of compliance with the law.  It seemed to me that everything about the man was out of compliance with life as most of us know it in San Diego. I discretely from a distance snapped a couple of pictures and rode on.  Later when I came out of a grocery store, I stopped to look at some pink Camellias.  A young woman asked me if they were roses, and I told her as much as I know about the difference between roses and camellias. She seemed genuinely interested. I got pictures there, too.  I had bought a can of sweet cherries in heavy juice at the store, so after lunch at home I used the cherries to put the finishing touches on a cheesecake I made yesterday. 

Serendipity.

A hole opened up in Florida under a house

and swallowed a  man sleeping last week,

which is the way it happens sometimes...

suddenly... no sign or warning whatsoever...

No report of Cerberus or other hellhound.

I was thinking maybe for poetic justice

and to give us something to anticipate, 

a snake might be more appropriate...

what with all the trouble one caused Adam,

with more than a little bit of help from Eve.

Sunday Morning Breakfast is sometimes a feast that has nothing to do with omelettes or eggs over easy with sausage.  It’s the company we keep.  Being with special friends only occasionally makes the time with them especially good.  This morning was that kind of time.  The actual time was colorful, but I felt like rendering it in black and white to make the images remind me of old times. Life is good.

Although we sang in the same choir for awhile,  Josephine Higgins is somebody I didn’t know until today. I went to her memorial service in San Clemente because she’s the mother of my friend Ray. She died the twenty-second of last month at the age of ninety-four. I am acquainted with her now because I was introduced to her by her family in a celebration of her life.  I won’t forget today, and I will always remember Josephine because the people who have always loved her know how to mix grief and mourning and remembering in a way that makes a memorial service a joyful event.  

Usually I wouldn’t consider taking pictures at a funeral, but this wasn’t a funeral. It was a celebration.  I doubt that anyone saw me taking the pictures with my very smallest camera because I held it low and aimed without using a viewfinder.  Later I got permission from Ray to use them for my Blog today... because that’s the format I use for keeping track of how I see the world. I like to come to the end of a day saying to myself that life is good.  I can definitely do that today.

Searching for Meaning

Fascinated by what happened to yellow and blue stripes in almost unbearable light this afternoon as I drove into the sun across an almost deserted parking lot in Mission Valley, I thought of Stephen Dunning’s poem, “Some Haystacks Don’t Even Have a Needle.”  I’m glad nobody is demanding that I explain why the glare and stripes started me thinking about Dunning and his poem. I also thought of some abstract expressionist artists whose work I like even thought I don’t understand at all what it means. Wandering out across the parking lot taking pictures of what probably seemed like nothing to someone watching, I must have looked like a crazy man. That’s all right.  I’m O.K. with it.  The stripes obviously were supposed to mean something... to signal drivers where to go and when to stop, or not. I stopped my journey home, parked my car, and took some pictures.

Looking away from the light sometimes clears things up.