Caravans transport the precious across the sand. They move at night, the only time when it’s not too hot, and even then the heat has soaked into the ground and comes at you from below rather than above, which is somehow even worse. Silk curtains are a silly way of keeping the dust out of the peopled carriages, but they’re mostly for the sun anyway. Centuries ago this was how you moved – at night, cloaked for protection, jostled and uncomfortably confined. Whoever thought this was romantic was senseless.
“What is the endgame of all these megaconstructions? Well, in ancient Egypt, the late 6th-dynasty state had not only become so large that it was nonfunctional (think of the giant cable company that never answers the phone), it had also become a mass of intercompeting elites who used the government to serve no one but themselves. (Think of today’s relentless multimillion-dollar bonuses, payoffs, bribes, insider trading, and fraud, all happening openly with no one going to prison.) As the competition ramped up, and as the Egyptian state became impoverished from mismanagement, the end result was nothing less than war.” – Kara Cooney
At the time of this writing – very early in the morning before house or town are even awake – it’s still raining, as it’s been for the past two days. This has been a consistent hard rain, with flooding in many places. After a stretch of sunny warm days, this change has felt especially jarring, and maybe that’s the reason for the melancholy of late. “If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor…”
Maybe this should have been the farewell to summer song come September, but some goodbyes happen before you’re ready and willing – those are the toughest ones. And when endings happen in the middle of summer, they somehow seem even sadder. This is the spot of the year when Dad left us; I found myself crying in the shower the other day for seemingly no reason before I realized what was happening. The body and mind will insist on release even if you don’t think you’re ready. At times of great upheaval, I find it best to go with the flow while letting the river simply rush around you. It also helps to accept the sadness and sorrow and loss, let the torrents out while feeling every last blade of hurt, and then, slowly, coming back to your breathing, back to the only way you learned to survive, back to the exquisite beauty of being alive and being vulnerable. Back to the ritual of saying goodbye.
Our recent episode of Mercury in retrograde motion wreaked much havoc with certain astrological signs – yours truly and my fellow Virgos especially – and now we have a full Buck Moon with which to contend tonight. There’s a lot of messiness on both fronts usually. Additionally, Saturn is now in retrograde motion through the end of the year, but this may be beneficial to anyone who has been wronged, secretly or not-so-secretly, as this is supposedly the justice and come-uppance moment for those situations. People generally know enough not to wrong me, but sometimes attacks manage to get through, especially when least expected, and perhaps even least intended. That all finds resolution if we are to believe the current Saturn placement, or any astrological nonsense that’s flying about right now.
Happily for me, and I mean that in quite a literal sense, I no longer seek vengeance or retribution as I once did. Harboring hate and resentment and bitterness only ever hurts the harborer – the villains have already moved on to their next victim. It is so rarely ever about you, and anyone with a healthy ego finds that difficult to fathom. I’ve worked on my ego over the years and have reached a place where there’s a genuine sense of self-worth rather than the vain show-off nature of an unhealthy ego. At the ripe old age of fifty, I’m also more grounded and solid than I’ve ever been, and daily meditations keep my wandering, overthinking and overanalyzing mind in helpful check. It’s boring to relate – you all want the drama and the heartache, and I’m happy to not supply it. Finally, my good friends have been with me for decades, and have yet to go anywhere, so I must be doing something right; my friendships sustain and see me through the rough patches, and I continually work on nourishing and fostering them because that’s what good friends do.
As for this period of comeuppance and justice, I’m hoping my own reckoning spares me any great pain because no one is perfect.
This continues our recent run of Egyptian-themed posts, and if you were coming here for some serious and somber politically-slanted ramblings, you don’t know me or this blog very well. We don’t dive into sociopolitical discourse very often, and certainly not on a global scale. We walk like an Egyptian, Bangles-style, making no apologies for the superficial glancing – you can find hard news just about anywhere else (if such a thing even exists anymore). Here we are fantasy and fun and glamorous accents – and if there’s a deeper message it’s usually of the more personal sort rather than a broader social commentary. You have to dig deep for that, and summer isn’t a time for digging deep. Summer is for light listening, as in this evocative piece from Amir Hossein Feyzi called ‘Shahrzad’.
Evoking markets of magic carpets, spices and enchanted lanterns, the summer whispers of warm climes, of riding the stars high above the desert on inky blue midnights. Lands far away, close in mind and spirit, grasped when never even seen…
Hieroglyphics may have been the first form of blogging as we know it, which is just another form of storytelling and sharing information and pictures. Limited to their physical confines, wall drawings were bound to their time and place, whereas we have been released to deliver such stories worldwide in the space of a few seconds. The world spins faster than it realizes – too fast perhaps. And once you start something in motion it can be very difficult to stop it. Laws of inertia and what-not….
Summer thunder rumbles somewhere to the East, while a multitude of the lightest taps sound on the roof above me. Lying on the bed in the attic, I attempt to read a few pages from my book, but the sound of a summer storm is always the most conducive to falling swiftly asleep, and on this late afternoon I allow it to happen. I’m in a melancholy mood, and sleep feels like the best way to work through it, especially when all the world is able to do is rain.
When I would get depressed in college I would find solace in sleep – not in a dangerous, wish-my-life-would-end way, but in a resigned, resolute, and determined decision to lose consciousness in the name of brief relief. It afforded me just enough peace to keep going, to get through my studies, to greet another day. Right when I was about to slip into a total state of despondency, things would look up, my mood would shift, and I’d be back to myself. No pills, no therapy, no magic. On this afternoon, as sky bleeds into earth and light bleeds into night, I let a little heartbreak at the world push me into my own proverbial bloodletting.
What is there to do? Only rain falling down from the sky Only me and you fair and plain, Nothing lost and nothing gained
Only the love nothing more, nothing less comes between us Temperatures rising, my passion is burning inside…
My world in light saving all as one A love that no one can deny My one true light, same for everyone A love we dare you to defy
Only rain
‘The Summer Book’ is easy reading, though surprisingly dark for a book about summer. It is the perfect read for this very moment, for this rainy night. More thunder, ominous and strangely comforting, sounds in the distance. Rain patters on the air conditioner in the window, its gentle cadence the ideal bit of white noise to quiet the voices in my head, or at least to override them. Some things cannot be silenced, so you adjust other sounds around you, shifting perspective, changing prominence – all tricks leading to peace, even if it is a false peace. Anything to get through the night.
“She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.” – Tove Jansson
I won’t settle for less, but no regrets See myself in your own reflection (see myself in your reflection) Something in your eyes that tells me why I’m a fool for your warm affection (I’m a fool for your affection)
Only the love, nothing more, nothing less comes between us Temperature’s rising, My passion is burning inside
My world in light saving all as one A love that no one can deny My one true light, same for everyone A love we dare you to defy
Only rain
Birdsong trills outside – brave birds to be calling in these thunderstruck skies – and I wonder at why they’re singing during such a time. Perhaps they need their spirits lifted too, and a song is all they have to approximate joy on such a dim day. This little song by Erasure called ‘Rain’ sounds cheery and its lyrics are defiantly, ebulliently joyful. Rain and light, at odds and peace, an unlikely partnership that persists in spite of their seemingly-opposite nature. Maybe they need one another to truly embody who they were meant to be, or maybe it’s just a troublesome twosome that will never reconcile, their tension the energy and friction that keeps them moving forward, only and always together. A treacherous trick of the world. Meanwhile, all the sky can manage to do is rain – only rain…
You are my, my one true, my world in light You are my, my one true, my world in light
My world in light saving all as one A love that no one can deny My one true light, same for everyone A love we dare you to defy My world in light saving all as one A love we dare you to defy
Only rain
“It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.” ~ Tove Jansson
This post should probably come later in the day, as this song has a late-night vibe that doesn’t quite gel with the morning, but here it is anyway. Come back tonight and play it again if you are so inclined – for now, let the summer jam of ‘Summer Is Here‘ fill the silence as we traverse our Egyptian excursion on this Solid Gold Summer journey. From the album ‘Egyptian Secrets’, this is the Adam Deitch Quartet giving us summer living, late or early or just about right on time.
Ah the blues The ball and chain that is ’round every English musician’s leg In fact every musician’s leg Tryin’ to kick it off baby? No no. You’ll just never do it And these are the blues of time And the blues of a woman And a man thinkin’ of her As time goes by…
Fast-forward to this autumn, when the blues plays backdrop to a certain Fall by a certain someone you’ve seen here for a certain two-decades-plus, and you have a preview of what the next season is going to bring. A soothsayer sometimes is just an educated guesser. Or the master of their own destiny. Right now I am not feeling very much like either, so I slow things down to remind myself it’s still summer, that there are still sunny days to come – though maybe not this week – and I have a little less than a month left of my fiftieth year on earth. A song, then, for my deceased youth – a song to my former self – a song for the ages:
There is nothin’ I can do If you leave me here to cry There is nothin’ I can do If you leave me here to cry You know my love will follow you baby Mmm until the day I die
Some days you feel all of your fifty years – you creak and crack as you slowly push against gravity, awkwardly raising yourself into an upright position then stumbling into the dark of early morning. It’s a wakening that has taken place every day for fifty years – not always in the same room, or the same time, or the same city – but at least once a day for all this time I have risen and done this same routine of getting up. Seems like such a simple thing, but oh how much it sometimes takes to face the day, and how much so many will never know…
I’ve given you all I own; That is one thing you cannot deny Oh I’ve given you all I own; Baby that is one thing you cannot deny And my love will follow you baby Yeah Till the day this man dies.
Feeling all these fifty years, I stand before the mirror of the camera’s gaze in underwear and morning grogginess, having reached the point where such revelatory actions no longer thrill or scare me; chalk that up to this very blog, which has taught me to be nakedly myself in a twenty-three-year trajectory to reach an emotional couch of comfort and genuine confidence. Realizing one’s worth takes time – in my case at least fifty years, and counting, because I am far from done. I am also tired – some of the fuel gone now that I know there is nothing left to prove – and weary from the toll it takes to realize this, to live it, and to get up another day. Happily, it happens mostly on autopilot these mornings, and the muscle memory of rising still sees me through this essential task – most of the time I don’t even think about it.
I’ve got failure all around me No matter how hard I try. I’ve got failure It’s all around me No matter how hard I Try try You know my ghost will haunt you baby Until the day you stop down and die Well you better get up Right now right now
The music sounds like fall, and I know it’s coming, and still I sing these words to my younger self, my former selves, a battle between me and the other versions of me that came before – that quintessential battle with the self that never ends without Pyrrhic retribution. To conquer yourself is to conquer yourself. One can’t help that certain parts of former selves be vanquished, exiled – and you will miss those parts of yourself, even if you knew they couldn’t and shouldn’t last.
Well You think that you have left me behind And that with your other man you’re safe And you’re away from me baby but uh One o’ these days you’re gonna break down and cry Because there is no escape from this man Because this man’s love is so strong He’s gonna haunt you You know my love will follow you Mmm until the day I die
Yet as much as you will try leave your past behind, by my age you realize that it can’t really be done. With each realization and determination of leaving something behind, you understand that you have brought it with you by acknowledging it. You are who you are because of all the things that happened to you in the past, and to lose any of that is to sunder the person you’ve become. The soul wasn’t made to take that kind of cleaving. And so we dance – me and all my former selves – me and all the past – a dance to the death, because death isn’t anything more than a celebration of a life made whole, made complete by its imminent arrival; death is confirmation that you were here, that once you lived. I write this to render it less frightening, as I’m closer to dying than to being born, and I sing this song to myself as a reminder to stop trying to get away from who I once was. Learning to forgive myself is something I couldn’t do back then – it’s something I have to work on now.
There is just one thing I want to tell you before I go I’m gonna leave it I’m gonna leave it Leave it up to you So long, baby, bye-bye Hey I’m gonna leave it up to you baby So long, baby ,bye-bye
Well you know my love will follow you Mmm ’til the day I die
This blog recap begins as we are set to get rain for the next five days, so all the sunny recounting will officially be in the past. Just as I was getting back into the sunny swing of summer, the forecast changes. We change, we shift, we adapt, and we complain. Summer will happen rain or shine. On with the weekly recap…
Taming this beast is more than a literary reference, and I made it through the wilderness. (Somehow I made it through…)
Celebrating my Godson’s birthday brought me back to my hometown for a quick visit, and after watching him charge around the backyard on his new wheels with his cousin, I went indoors to find the twins and see how they were faring in this golden summer. They were gearing up for some travels, and Noah showed me his impressive cologne cabinet (modeled after yours truly). I sampled a few, and he has surprisingly sophisticated tastes for such a young age. (My teen years were marred by flights of Curve and Cool Water.)
Emi joined us in the dining room and Jaxon came in just long enough to pose for a few pics. Siblings are funny, as exemplified by the antics only half-captured here. Uncle Al did not have to step in as it was mostly play (I think). Anyway, what am I really going to do? It was a lovely visit, and we went out for ice cream all the way to Broadalbin because that’s what an Uncle with wheels is for. Emi paid because she has a job now. I thanked her with great pride, and just the slightest bit of sorrow, because it seems they really are growing up this quickly. A silly song that rekindles our 70’s vibe from this Solid Gold Summer, as it was on the playlist on our way to the ice cream stand.
The cup plant, despite a devastating aphid attack that continues out-of-hand, has managed to throw up a few yellow blooms against the blue sky. A valiant effort, and if anyone knows of any aphid-stoppers (aside from ladybugs, 1000 of which did nothing to the aphids last year) please send them my way. For now, I will enjoy the few blooms that made it through.
I feel summer slipping away faster than any of us want, so I took the summer back by spending a day not spending it, only enjoying – the sun, the warmth, the flowers. the book, and the pool.
During yesterday’s brilliant late morning moments, I assembled a simple salad of cucumbers, fresh tomatoes grown on our patio, fresh basil from the garden, garbanzo beans, and mozzarella – doused with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil, salt and pepper. I threw in a few slivers of red onion that I’d soaked in water and vinegar to remove their edge, and it was the perfect summer salad to eat by the pool as I read lazily from my current book.
There was nowhere else I’d have rather been at that moment – the brilliance of a summer morning in July makes up for all sorts of January awfulness if you know how to store it in your heart. I paused to imprint the memory, to take in the flavors and the feeling of this summer day. Mindfulness makes for happiness.
One of my favorite things to do when I’m in Boston is to walk the city – not with any goal or destination in mind, just the act of walking and exploring and happening upon whatever happens along the way. It’s at odds with the carefully-choreographed precision that characterizes so much of the rest of my life, and it’s how I’d like to act more often. The last weekend in Boston proved good practice for that kind of letting go, though that also came with memories that surfaced and rushed to flood the heart with ideas for which I wasn’t entirely prepared, but I allowed myself to feel it all, and let the tears fill my eyes when they came rather than force them away.
One little kiss, a moment of bliss, then hours of deep regret One little smile, and after a while, a longing to forget One little heartache left as a token One little plaything carelessly broken
Ensconced in the Boston brownstone, one floor above the street lined with other brownstones, I finish my dinner that first night and take a moment to read a bit on the couch. Cole Porter plays in the background, lending the weekend a lovely soundtrack, the way he often provides a summer setting for evenings that turn solitude into magic. Many a Boston evening has been spent in similar fashion, and I’m suddenly waxing nostalgic for all the nights that came before. That can be troublesome and dangerous depending on what sort of mood Spirit decides to take me, but when the night is still light, as it happens to be at high summer, nothing feels as dangerous as it perhaps should, and so I prepare to walk.
On that first night of walking, I made the conscious decision to engage with whatever and whomever crossed my path. My first stop was a new plant store in the South End, and after the woman working there welcomed me in I asked her how long they had been open, telling her how beautiful the space was. She told me the quick story of how they had moved from a nearby spot, and then she thanked me as I told her I’d definitely be back, then continued on my way.
Meandering through the South End, I crossed through Chinatown then the financial district before finding myself at the harbor – Spirit seemed to be guiding me to the water, and as I looked out onto the water that led into the Atlantic Ocean, my mind wandered all the way to Cape Cod, to the first man I can remember ever remotely crushing on – a guy who was running the dolphin show at a place called Aqua Circus. He probably exists mostly as a made-up visage in my mind of a slightly-curly-and-reddish-brown haired man, the same shade as the bit of chest hair that showed at the top of the zip-up hoodie that wasn’t zipped all the way up. While that lives as possible fiction, I distinctly remember that before his show began he asked if I would be his helper for the night, and I hesitantly said yes because I knew there was no alternative to saying no to him, and I didn’t want there to be. The help I was to provide consisted of retrieving several small rubber hoops that he would ask me to give to him at a certain point in the proceedings. It was the first time a gentleman had showed any interest in me – I wasn’t more than ten years old, and I felt like the whole world had suddenly opened up and revealed some wonderful secret to me and only me. Enraptured, I sat at the edge of my seat until he looked for me, then I carefully made my way to the hoops, and onto the little stage at the end of the pool. While the dolphins had been my main interest, at that moment they fell away, their clicks and clucks and calls fading into the slow motion world where this young man stood before me, all gratitude and a golden smile and a public round of thanks that the audience joined in granting me, and all I wanted was to help him more.
Strange how that memory came flooding back as I looked out over Boston Harbor. He was one of the first men I remember stirring something in me that no girl or woman ever would, and I don’t always think of him, not the way I would think of other men this evening. The screams of a seagull brought me back to the present moment, and I backed away from the water.
It was at this place where I once ran on a winter’s night after I foolishly fell for a one-night-stand in Rochester, NY – the man who brushed the snow off my car the next morning, and so I decided I had to love him. Not knowing any better didn’t diminish the pain that ensued, and I remember arriving here after a breathless almost-run from the Government Center T stop and soaking up the solitude and loneliness – unlike the summer night at hand, that winter’s night was entirely bereft of people. I was alone, and I could cry without worry of anyone seeing – and I did, to the sad soundtrack of a flagpole clanging desolately in the wind. Tears welled up again, not for the present moment, but for that young man I was back then, the guy who didn’t know what to make of all those feelings, all those yearnings, all that loneliness. As for the one-night-stand guy, he would contact me years later, as many of them would, inviting me to meet if ever I was in his town, and by then the magic was always gone, the hurt eradicating whatever I once felt for them. It was never really about them anyway.
Remember you vowed By all the stars above you Remember?
I made my way through Faneuil Hall, the place I worked through my last years of college and beyond, then Spirit impelled me to follow the roads to the place where the very first man who kissed me used to live. It was right across the street from the very first Boston hotel I stayed at when my Mom brought my brother and I to the city. Some walks are steeped in nostalgia, and for whatever reason I was brought back to those two pivotal times and places, each sad and astounding and wonderful in their own way. For the very first Boston stay, my mother took us to see ‘E.T.’ at the movie theater nearby; I was more excited about the small plant store across the way, where I’d spend a good hour just inspecting and taking in the tiny collection of houseplants they had on display.
As for the man who gave me my first kiss among other firsts, I remember the stale smell of his little room. The towel around his waist. The sad little sink kitchen set-up that butted up against the bed. The worn and torn Alcoholics Anonymous book that stood on the windowsill. The way his stubble felt like it was cutting into my face, the way I wanted more. The way he was breaking my heart and the way I didn’t know why. We are so careless with each other, even when we know better.
Remember we found a lonely spot And after I learned to care a lot
I followed the river back toward home, the opposite way that man had taken me when we first walked together on a warm and sunny September day. You can’t correct the past by retreading it, but once in a while you understand it a little better, and in that understanding is a little bit of resolution, an easing of whatever faded hurt might remain. All these nights of walking in Boston may be my attempt at chipping away at the pain. Most times, nothing comes of it but a few thousand steps; sometimes the tears land, and some healing happens.
Making my way through the Boston Public Garden restores my sense of calm, and all the happy memories that the garden holds. It carries a different charm in the evening, when the bats are flying about and the waterfowl have tucked their heads into their necks. My head was feeling scattered, and whenever that happens the garden grounds me – this one and all of them. Once I felt right again, I continued on for the last leg home, passing a diner that I would eat at the morning of my departure.
You promised that you’d forget me not But you forgot To remember
In the sunlight of the next day, all the darkness is forgotten, and all the nostalgia too. The past once again recedes into the past, the ghosts of people who once populated and seemed so important to me disappearing behind the colorful blooms of flowers who take happy pride of place in the mind. The world rights itself on the daily if we let it. Yet I don’t depart unchanged.
Into my dreams you wandered it seems, and then there came a day You loved me too; my dreams had come true, and all the world was May But soon the May-time turned to December You had forgotten; do you remember?
Sometimes you can tell when something special is in the offing – it carries on the wind, maybe in the scent of the sea – and sometimes you simply go along with the gentle unfolding of a weekend in Boston, and nothing much happens and in that is the magic, but only when you listen closely and carefully. When I arrived, the city was in gorgeous bloom – a beautifully sunny July afternoon, and my only goal was to walk the weekend away and be mostly alone with my thoughts and mental meanderings.
At words poetic, I’m so pathetic That I always have found it best Instead of getting ’em off my chest To let ’em rest unexpressed I hate parading my serenading As I’ll probably miss a bar But if this ditty is not so pretty At least it’ll tell you How great you are
At this private little pied-à-terre where I’ve always had a home-away-from-home, one can wear their underwear to dinner and not be bothered. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that bring us the most joy. I settle into comfort and charcuterie, taking my time and listening to Cole Porter as the light slowly lowered in the sky, and with it some of the harsher heat. I indulged, as I was planning on doing a lot of walking this weekend.
Some weekends in Boston have a way of melting their days into one mash-up of magic and emotions, and when they’re done my mind is so full it’s difficult to recall everything that happened in the order that it all went down – that’s always a good sign that I was present in the moment and not documenting of chronicling things, which can keep one at a remove and distance. It’s better to be immersed and mindful, and so this post will melt into the next one as far as my nocturnal ambulations go. The spirit is what counts, and the spirit is what I will endeavor to capture.
“You’re the purple light Of a summer night in Spain…” – Cole Porter
