Over at City Scene where I lived for a long time, I stopped by today to leave something at the old place, and I fell in love all over again with the Melaleuca Trees.  They defy me to describe them, so the only thing I can do is take pictures, and even the pictures are too complex for words.  As the trees grow, day to day and week to week, they change.  I can't think of anything that is more like life than these trees.

I know, I know... You've seen this scene many times before, but tonight was special.  The program was "The Classical Style" and the program was predictably Haydn, Prokofiev and Bartok... Ok so it should have been "The Late Classical Style with Haydn from an Earlier Time."  Anyway, it was a very good concert.  All of the music was outstanding, but my favorite was the part of the evening that came after the intermission... Bela Bartok wrote his Concerto for Orchestra in the last year of his life.  He had been ill and on the edge of death, yet he poured all his genius into the creation of this amazing work.  The conductor for the evening, Lahav Shani, is only 28 years old.  He managed to get sounds from the orchestra that I sat amazed to hear.  At the end of the program, I felt very glad that Bartok lived to create his concerto.  Prokofiev and Haydn works were outstanding also.  I remembered hearing Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 in D Major and Haydn's Sinfonia concertante in B-flat Major,  but I hadn't ever heard the Bartok Concerto.  I was glad to have been in Symphony Hall tonight.

No words are necessary... This is the time of year in San Diego when the Flowering Pear Trees are in full bloom.  Wow!  What a sight they are this year.  You can take a drive (don't tell the residents there that I told you about it) to Camino Degrazia on the hill above Friar's Road West of Highway 163... or you can take a walk in Balboa Park between the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum... The flowering trees will take your breath away.

I had photographed some flowers today, beautiful flowers, but I decided I'd save them for a later BLOG post.  The news from Washington is grim.  The President is determined to ignore the Constitutional imperatives and to continue to issue papers to keep out Muslims and all other groups that he considers his personal enemies.  He is using the supposed threat of Islam to America to represent his own inability to deal with conditions that seem to him to be negative responses to him personally.  My mood is best represented by the coastline to the north of San Diego.  It is bleak and forbidding and imposing and strong.  That is what the President is going to encounter throughout his four years in office. The America I know is not the America Trump continues to believe he can mold into whatever shape that pleases him.  This is a strong country that will not change itself to match Trump's wishes for a country he can "whip" with tweets into whatever shape he prefers.

It is important for all of us who recognize what a mistake his election represents to simply resist and wait.  He will continue to be his own worst enemy.

Today, February 05, is son David's 59th birthday.  He makes his Mother and me very proud.  David is active in San Diego organizations that benefit other people.  He is a man for others.  It is because of people like him that democracy works. He is a strong, self-actualizing individual, and he respects other individuals and works to ensure that all people are enabled to live freely.

...a break today from teeth grinding over "stuff" the President is doing...

"Future events, whatever they may be, will not deprive the
Americans of their climate or their inland seas, their great
rivers...their exuberant soil...(or)that love of prosperity and
spirit of enterprise, which seem to be the distinctive characteristics 
of their race..."
                                    --Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

I went looking through my files and found the perfect pictures to go with the quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville and Walt Whitman.  I confess that I was looking for a photograph I know I took of a great tree in Balboa Park; but before I found that picture, I came across this one I took three or four years ago after a visit to our house by Karl Backus and his two beautiful daughters... a drawing of a tree done by Sophie Backus.  I've always considered the tree in this picture to be my favorite.  Sophie may not even remember making the picture, but I won't forget the day or the tree.  

"I heard the mighty tree, its death-chant chanting...

In the echo of teamsters' calls and the clinking chains,

and the music of choppers' axes,

The falling trunk and limbs, the muffled shriek, the groan...

Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America,

heir of the past so grand

To build a grander future."

              --Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

    

Margaret and I had a reason to be on a balcony facing the Eastern mountains from the fourth floor of our building.  The mountains, serious mountains, begin not very far from where we have lived for thirty years.  San Diego County which hugs Mexico's north western border is an amazing part of the world.  I feel fortunate to live in such a place.  The President of the United States apparently would like citizens of the U.S.A. to develop a fear and perhaps a distaste for the country just south of where I live.  Among many other reasons to be alarmed by the President's appointments and tweets is his penchant for telling untruthful stories that he surely knows will be exposed to be lies.  

The danger to the country, and perhaps to the world is that the U.S.A. has become know as a stable, powerful place of order.  We are a nation with divergent political ideas, but we have been a nation that usually manages the differences with grace.  We are known as a country where truth is valued. This President is interjecting into the national and even into the world order a sense that truth can be made to be whatever the administration and the Congress with the most power declares it to be.  Those of us who value veracity and truth-telling must continue to insist that lies promoted by people in power are still lies.  We must insist that newspapers and other media sources tell us truth.  We citizens must recognize untruth and insist that we do not believe lies.  We must continue to insist that media shall remain free to state truth and to give all people freedom to disagree with those who have political power.

Today is Margaret's birthday... Nancy was here because her flowers were on the table.  David and David were here and Patrick and Elaine and Michael and Ed and Jim and Irene Fudge and Wayne and Diana and John and Matt...  and wonderful servering staff of Paradise Village...BEAUTIFUL EVENING.

This jade horse was made in China sometime before we lived in Singapore, so it is more than fifty years old.  I don't know who the carver was.  It is clearly not made of the best quality jade, but I like the way the light shines through it.  

The interesting news from Trumpland yesterday and today is the Press Secretary's attempt to explain away the President's choice of words and to try to put a good "meaning" on a word like "ban."  In the Press Room if he can't find a way to make the word useful and therefore seem a positive direction of the President's rambling, he says the word was simply copied by the administration from the "media," and we know what the President' and his crew think of the media.  Records show that the word "ban" was used by the President and the press only repeated what he said.  The word "ban," Sean Spicer says, doesn't mean what we think it means.  He says it certainly doesn't mean the President intends to keep out a religious group and it doesn't mean that Muslims won't be allowed into the country. The more the President says about any subject, the more muddled his meaning becomes, and Spicer seems only to make things worse. 

Daughter Nancy sent the most beautiful bouquet of flowers for her Mother's birthday which comes later this week... enough beauty for a day, for a week, for a month, for this year. Tomorrow when I read again what the President is doing, I'll think about these flowers and be glad there is something beautiful here, and I'll remind myself that the Trump presidency won't last forever.

The first sculpture was created by Ruth Asawa, a San Francisco artist who lived from 1926 until 2013.  The work is in the museum in North-Western Arkansas called Crystal Bridges.  The museum was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton.  It is appropriate that this fine museum of American art in Arkansas has this piece by Asawa.  The artist spent some time in Arkansas during World War II as a Japanese American kept in detention for no other reason than she was Japanese.  The work is typical of Ruth Asawa’s twisted wire sculptures.  In this Blog post the other piece of art is Homage to the Square by Joseph Albers.  Asawa studied art at Black Mountain College School of Art while Albers was head of the painting  program there.  He later left Black Mountain and became the head of the department of design at Yale.  

I think including these two artists’ work in today’s BLOG post is appropriate considering the situation in Washington, D.C.  What we see lacking in the Trump administration’s beginning as head of the U.S.A. is order and sensibility.  Chaos seems to be the main characteristic of President Trump's administration. Very little that is happening makes sense.  Today Trump fired the acting Attorney General because she said she couldn’t agree with the immigration orders of the President. Rather than go into my reasons for agreeing with Sally Yates, the fired attorney, I am hoping this BLOG post simply states my fear that the new administration is chaotic and dangerous to the American way of life and the American way of government.  We will get through this difficult period just as world got through the difficult period of war that we know as World War II.  Joseph Albers, was a German who became an important American artist, He was born in Germany in 1888 and died in America in 1976.  He came to America in 1933 when Hitler restricted expression in Germany, including the work of artists.

 Margaret and I went to the San Diego Symphony this afternoon... another concert built around, as other concerts this month have been, American music.  The title of today's program was American Riffs and Rhapsodies.  The first composer was Henry Cowell and the piece by Cowell was "Hymn" from Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2 for String Orchestra.  I didn't know Cowell, but the short piece composed by him was a very good way to begin a good program.  The other composers were more familiar: Steven Stucky, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Morton Gould, and Duke Ellington.  I don't think I have ever heard the orchestra sound better. The guest conductor was James Gaffigan, very animated, very good.

The Barber piece was Symphony No. 1.  Leonard Bernstein's piece was Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, for Solo Clarinet & Jazz Orchestra.  Sheryl Renk was clarinetist.  Wow! I hadn't thought of Morton Gould for a long time and his piece was Tap Dance Concerto and a guest tap dancer, Cartier Williams,  accompanied the orchestra...  again Wow!  The audience was enthusiastic about the Duke Ellington, Harlem...  Again Wow!  Wow!  Wow!

Canada's Prime Minister, JustinTrudeau said in a tweet: "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada." 

I got the picture on the grounds of Crystal Bridges Museum in Northwestern Arkansas a couple of years ago.  It was summer in a time before Donald Trump became president of the United States.  Things will get better, but we must be pay attention to what the new administration is doing and respond appropriately to our members of Congress.  

I went through my picture file and found a photograph that I hadn't used because I somehow think I need permission to show somebody's face in a picture I'm passing around.  I got the picture below several years ago. I'm hoping the gentleman lying on the ground in Balboa Park, if he is recognized by someone or if he sees himself that those who see him and he himself will be proud to be associated in thought with the  poem by Emma Lazarus.

I have hoped in the week since Donald J. Trump was inaugurated into the top job in America that I had been wrong, that the office would change the man, that the person who seemed self-centered, narcissistic would be humbled by the great office, by the great responsibility.  Now I am frightened by what he has done already and by the prospect of what he may do in the weeks ahead. 

I have always been proud to be a citizen of the United States of America.  I have believed what Emma Lazarus said...for all of us. The 120 day suspension of the immigration process for all applicants for citizenship to the U.S.A. is an affront to me personally.  Over the years I have come to believe that I am a citizen of the world.  The President has put me out of the country I love.  He shames me.  He makes me ashamed of what America will seem to be, of what I will seem to be, if the larger world believes this man who is president is thought to be who we are. 

                             Emma Lazarus, quote on the Statue of liberty

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless,

Tempest-tossed to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

What is the record, I wonder, for the least sensible, most perplexing, most terrifying first week after inauguration of an American president?  Has there ever been a week after the inauguration like this one?  Is anybody really comfortable, in either political party, with the person who has been elected to the office that is the seat of the  most powerful individual in the world?  What can members of his family be thinking?  Does he really understand what he has been elected to do?  Does he care that he doesn't understand?

I go to bed every night wondering what tomorrow will bring from him.  I wonder every night what his tweets tomorrow will say. For the first time in my lifetime I wonder if the country that I have always been glad to be part of can manage to get to the end of a president's administration with its moral and political base intact.

A Balboa Park Rainbow Eucalyptus:  Sometimes beauty is right there on the trunk of a tree.  It just requires a slower pace, a closer attention, a willingness to see something that isn't immediately obvious.  I'm afraid to say where in the park this tree is growing and where on the tree I aimed my camera (actually my cell phone camera).  Vandals have already found the other side of this tree, and they have already done the "kilroy was here" defacing that a few people seem not to be able to control in themselves... perhaps because they don't go more slowly, pay attention more carefully to the beauty that is there, and are unwilling to see the extraordinary natural beauty that is right before them. If they should pay attention to the details of the common plants near the tree, they would want, I hope, to protect and keep the natural mystery of the thing itself.

This afternoon Margaret and I took a walk around our part of National City.  The clouds had broken into fluffy patches.  A rainbow had settled itself over the Eastern sky.  Rain had retreated and unless something comes up in the late afternoon, the six days of rain have come to an end, and we are back to San Diego's usual winter weather.  This is truly a beautiful place.  Some people say the climate here is the most perfect in the world.  I believe it.  Perhaps believing is too easy.  Perhaps that's why the guy who is now the President of the United States feels free to make up numbers and events because he knows we are a nation of easy believers... but I don't believe his statement this morning that in the last election we had three million people voting illegally.  He implied that they voted for the other candidate, and if there had been no voter fraud he would have won the popular election as well as the Electoral College election.  The guy makes up stories.The next four years will be interesting...

In Balboa Park a man was making bubbles... between rain squalls... and children with their parents were entertained... they were fascinated, mystified and entertained.  Life is good.