Is there any place on Earth where the yellow daisy plant doesn't grow in springtime? If there is such a place I don't want to go there... especially in springtime.  In San Diego County these flowers are ubiquitous... along every roadway, even the freeways. There are other flowers growing here, but none catches the light in the way these beauties do.  It has occurred to me that these flowers are not the daisies that I have always called by that name; so if there is another name, and if they are not native to this area, don't tell me.

What makes National City, where Margaret and I live, an all American place.  We've got a McDonald's, a Popeyes, a Starbucks, and a Dunk'n Donuts all in one place near the Plaza off-ramp from the 805 Freeway.  The freeway, one of two cutting through National City, helps establish our city as all American.

I intended this post to be something of a joke, but I saw the Manila Seafood sign in the Popeyes photograph and was reminded that National City is a serious international town.  The population is as diverse as any I know in America.  The Plaza off-ramp on the 805 Freeway is only ten miles from the Mexican Border...and the town's waterfront hugs the South Bay which runs along the Pacific Ocean from San Diego down to the southernmost part of the United States.  Every business establishment that I know in National City greets citizens with at least two languages, sometimes more. Just about everybody here speaks Spanish as well as English... and nobody I know is apologetic when using another language to express a thought.  I am proud to be a citizen of such as place as this.

Clyde Yoshida is a teacher, an artist, a soap maker, and a farmer.  He is better than good at all of these things he does.  After coffee this morning I dropped him off at his house (I was going to say farm but changed my mind) where he gave me permission to take pictures of his crop of pineapples and his newly planted strawberries. Now don't get me wrong when I say Clyde is a pot gardener.  The stuff of his garden you don't smoke.  His Pineapples and Blue Berries and his newly planted Straw Berries are grown in pots.  His pineapples are at least two generations down the line from pineapples he and Dave ate sometime long ago.  Clyde was born in hawaii which may account for his gardening skills and farming instincts. Somebody at the nursery sold him on the strawberries by telling him that the ripe berries (called Bubble Berries) taste like bubble gum. I picked and ate one of his blue berries this morning.  I'll come back for a Bubble Berry when the time is right.

Neither of the pictures today were captured today.  The pianist was performing yesterday at Paradise Village, and the three cactus photos I snapped in the Davids' backyard on Sunday.  All of the photos in today's BLOG were taken with my cell phone.

East Second Street in National City...  I think I know now why the people in Chula Vista and in San Diego call this place Nasty City.  Actually, National City is a good place with good people, but I have to admit that it's a place with not so many houses that could be easily fitted into La Jolla or Rancho Santa Fe. I took these pictures today not very far from the site of the old Samuel Gompers Secondary School.  The area is where "real" people live. I'm feeling glad to be among real people, and I am especially glad to find bananas growing in yards... and I am glad to be able to see another country from the streets and from the windows of my apartment... and they may grow more expensive flowers in La Jolla and in Rancho Santa Fe, but the flowers are no more beautiful there than here... and the people here... Wonderful!  This is an international place.

My friend Bobbi Jordan sent the following two poems, one by e.e. cummings and, as she said, the Frost poem just slipped in somehow…  Bobbi was responding to my posting a few days ago the cummings poem Pity this Busy Monster.

I thought about Bobbi and others who love the poetry we shared at school on a walk near Patrick and Elaine's house at the edge of wilderness between San Diego and Rancho Santa Fe. The day was perfect and the walk along the wilderness paths where Patrick and Elaine walk and run regularly was spring being a perhaps hand coming carefully out of Nowhere.

Spring is like a perhaps hand 

(which comes carefully 

out of Nowhere)arranging 

a window,into which people look(while 

people stare

arranging and changing placing 

carefully there a strange 

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps 

Hand in a window 

(carefully to 

and fro moving New and 

Old things,while 

people stare carefully 

moving a perhaps 

fraction of flower here placing 

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

 Prayer In Spring - Poem by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above.

Outside on the southwest corner of the Museum of Photographic Arts stands my favorite tree in San Diego… or perhaps I should say that at the moment I cannot think of another tree in San Diego that I would less like to see disappear.  The Rainbow Eucalyptus tree this spring after the best winter rainy season I can remember is spectacular.  The last three photographs in my BLOG today are of the same tree.  There is no question about why it is named for the rainbow. 

Another phenomenon in Balboa Park today was a demonstration by a group of women who made me proud to be listed in the same species with them.  They are a group of women who declare that they cannot remain silent when the world which in its leadership is being dominated by males is in the worst condition in my lifetime. The man who is in charge of our country has decided to tweet that Bill O’Reilly, the man, the President’s friend, has done nothing wrong.  Our President during his campaign for the highest office of my country stated that a man could grab any woman by her private parts because men are stronger and dominant. He implied that males have a right to be considered more important.  Males have a right, he implied, to get whatever they want.  He is wrong.  

As I watched and listened to women today in Balboa Park I felt a strong sense of pride that I have personally been blessed with strong, self-determining women in my life.  My mother and my sisters and my wife deserve credit for all of the good things I have accomplished with my male life. I recognize that I have been blessed with maleness in a world where strong, dominant women could have done any job I held as well or better than I did.  In my lifetime men simply because they were male have had the advantage in the world of work whether or not they were the most capable. Perhaps the best thing about this incompetent president in the White House is that he is showing the world that simply being male is not enough. We are fortunate to have among our citizens plenty of people, many of them women, who could do his job better than he is doing it. The tide has turned. His maleness is not enough. 

Out walking again today among the flowers...  Sometimes it's looking at part of something, a piece of the whole, that brings focus what it is I'm seeing.  I especially like isolating only part of these magnificent Birds of Paradise to see what a combination of colors is here... and primrose that has been cut in half by the wind of by a bird or by someone walking in the garden.  The tree orchids (someday I'll learn the real name) are so beautiful they are unreal.

Some days here at Paradise Village make the world seem to be a place for Older people, and because San Diego Academy is next door the voices of children and the presence of children in our neighborhood make the world seem to be filled with all ages and all genders and all races and... and ...and basically to be what I have always experienced it to be...  This is who we are.  

Today some of us "older" folks were invited to attend a special program next door.  Dan Cohen, a local Channel 8 newscaster, came to the school to hear second graders read from a book they had made.  The class was celebrating Author's Day, and all of the members of the class were authors.  What a good day it was!  What a good world this one can be!  Let's see if we can get the word back to the folks in Washington.  We must secure a good future for these seven year old kids.

While I was out walking among the flowers today, I came across this incredible white rose.  I thought how perfect it is, and then I saw on the buds some little insects that would surely not be healthy for the plant.  I looked at other buds on the rose bush and found that they were also covered with the little 

bugs. For some reason I thought immediately about what I might do to destroy the invading insects, and then I remembered one of favorite poems... one by e.e. cummings.  I went home and found the poem and include it here.  I'll leave the little critters alone, I decided.  I found that I had taken a picture also today of something that was not born but was made.  I include it just for the hell of it.  I suppose I was affected by listening to the Trump guy talk about the Syrian tragedy and watching as he tried to describe how disturbed he is by the "killing of infants... just little babies" with poison gas, and I thought of what he is doing in our country to keep help from going to poor people, babies trapped in families where there won't be money and education enough for basic care... and then I remembered the days when I was a teacher and wondered what I would be saying to kids who are undoubtedly thinking and talking about this new set of problems. Sometimes listening and reading poems to them is the best thing to do.

'pity this busy monster, manunkind' pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go E. E. Cummings