Like the yolk of an egg, the central whorls of this daisy ring out in bright, cheerful yellow – a reflection of the summer sun from the ground below. These daisies have been in the garden for several years, coming back pretty robustly with some regular watering and feeding. This first flush of flowers is the biggest and best of the entire season, though they will sporadically throw out additional blooms in a smaller, secondary blooming.
Daisies are favorites of a couple of my friends – JoAnn and Suzie especially – so I’ll usually send them a few photos if they’re not here to see them in person. This is one way flowers bring people together.
Chef, Emmy-nominated television host, and entrepreneur Edward Delling-Williams wears many hats, and all of them quite jauntily. His ‘Paris Bistro Cooking’ show on Recipe TV is what drew me into his charming world, and his ‘Taste of London’ programs have me itching to get back to that enchanted city sooner rather than later. He earns this Dazzler of the Day thanks to a storied career and continued inspiration for finding and making all that tastes good in this world. Check out his website here for further evidence of his brilliance.
The oregano got away from me this year, bolting a bit too quickly into flower before I had a chance to pounce it back. Not as disastrous as if I’d let the basil follow-suit, but less than ideal when we want foliage over flowers. Attempting to turn lemons into lemonade, I hastily harvested the flower heads as soon as I realized what was happening and turned them into an elegant centerpiece for a summer dinner.
They make for a more refined appearance and tidier filler than that awful baby’s breath that florists still seem to use (who in hell wants the breath of baby anywhere near a beautiful bouquet?) This happy accident made for a bouquet unto itself, which is how summer should be – easy and elegant and simple.
For a dinner table display, there is enough interest in the whorls of each individual bud to entice a closer inspection, so when all else fails you have one more thing to discuss. My guests are always infinitely more interesting than having to resort to such tactics but for those of you seeking out topics, go for the oregano bloom.
Our Solid Gold Summer required a sleazy, cheesy, retro, and slightly raunchily-monikered mocktail for summer drinking purposes, and that comes in the super simple concoction I’ve christened ‘The Golden Shower‘. It is one of the easiest drinks to create, rooted in a simple can of orange soda, made slightly elevated and punchy with the fresh juice of one lime. I supposed if you wanted something boozier, you could add any number of liquors to this without compromising the simplicity – vodka, tequila, rum, possibly even gin. It’s been so long since I’ve had any interest or taste for spirits, I’ve forgotten what might work well, but if you drink have at it. For me, the following is more than enough for a refreshing summer drink.
Being charismatic, charming, gregarious and engaging are just the minor magics of Patrick ‘Patch’ Hyde, whose greatest skill, in my hungry opinion, is his wondrous way with fudge-making – a practice he’s been working on and perfecting since the age of sixteen. In July of 2018, he opened up his first store, ‘The Fudge Patch‘ and he currently has two locations – Greenwich Market and Brighton. Cunningly making use of hemp milk instead of dairy, The Fudge Patch offers vegan and gluten-free fudge made the old-fashioned way. As the man leading the fudge charge in London, Patch earns his first Dazzler of the Day, because my heart belongs to anyone who has a knack with a sweet treat. Check out ‘The Fudge Patch’ online here.
Topping the Billboard charts in the US, UK and several others countries, Madonna earns her 10th number one album with ‘Confessions II’ – which at the age of 67 and over four decades into a historical career has added another record to her collection. That makes her the only female American singer to have #1 albums in the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, 10’s and now 20’s. Five fucking decades – half a century. For all the naysayers who have been demanding her retirement, this sort of success and, yes, relevance, is a brutal and gratifying reality check. Say what you will about Madonna, you’re still talking about her, she’s still singing and selling albums, and one of you is not coming off well in this equation.
This has a bit of a personal spin to it, the way Madonna often seems to supply meaning at pivotal times in life. For the past couple of years, I’d started to write off the thrill and excitement and connection I once felt to music as a thing of youth, something that could no longer quite inspire me as it once did. Leave it to Madonna to prove that premature and somewhat silly; to think that I’d almost given up on experiencing such passion is a lesson that life doesn’t end at 40 or 50 or 67 – and shame on me for falling into those ageist beliefs. ‘Confessions II’ has reignited the creative spark, and I already feel the fire burning from within again. Let’s see where this musical era takes us…
Sunny Mondays in summer hit differently. Their intrinsically depressing nature is blunted by the power of the season, a reminder that nature is what will always matter in the end. Mondays are a human construct. Summer is invincible. Here is our weekly blog recap…
The summer days of my childhood were spent largely outside, swimming and biking and running around the neighborhood. My brother and I would be out of the house by 8 or 9 in the morning and not return until an early dinner time. Then we’d be back out again until the light just started to fade and June bugs swarmed the tops of all the trees. (Both usually drove me home before a shout from my parents.)
Back then we’d just go around to our friend’s houses, using the pool if they had one, or rustling up mischief in their overheated garages or cool and quiet basements. I don’t really recall what exactly we did – which probably meant it was mostly nothing. Kids could entertain themselves back then, without a television or computer or cel phone, and we would become better for it. We learned how to sit still with nothing to do. We learned how to entertain ourselves with nothing around but a bike or a garage of rubbish. We could create endless pool games that were so stupid and fun that the adults had to drag us out to eat lunch or we would have stayed in until our pruny fingers were malnourished. Like most adults, I remember those summer days as filled with glory – and in the 80’s it was literally true.
We pause in this retro summer of Solid Gold 70’s tunes to advance a bit into the 80’s with a Bruce Springsteen classic from his epic ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ album. To come of age at such a time meant Bruce, Michael, Prince and Madonna formed the phenomenal soundtrack to our formative years – and the music you have when you’re growing up is the music that shapes your personhood. Those of us who were children in the 80’s have a very distinctive musical DNA – once removed from disco, twice removed from classic rock, and gorgeously afflicted with the synth pop confections that would only last if they came with a melody. Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’ gave us a rock classic that the whole country embraced, and it rang with a built-in nostalgia that its lyrics so beautifully belied.
“I HOPE WHEN I GET OLD, I DON’T SIT AROUND THINKING ABOUT IT, BUT I PROBABLY WILL…”
A lost opportunity perhaps, but I haven’t been minding much of the World Cup games that have gone on, aside from the one that took place near Boston on our recent BroSox Adventure. That may change with this crowning of Erling Haaland as Dazzler of the Day. Playing for Norway, Haaland has captured the hearts of many with his golden mane of flowing hair and washboard abs. Is there another point to this game?
A modern spin on the 70’s vibe that our Solid Gold Summer has previously embodied, this is the Tensnake Remix of Duo Lipa’s infectious ‘Hallucinate’, which brings that gloriously tacky decade into the modern musical landscape, melding summers past, present, and future as we look to the next stage of our SG Summer. Are you ready to funk the fuck out? Let the baseline shake you…
Body make you silly, make you do what I want Oh, baby, I can make it pretty, I could string you along But I’mma love you like a fool Breathe you in ’til I hallucinate
I hallucinate when you call my name Got stars in my eyes and they don’t fade when you come my way I’m losing my m-m-m-mind, m-m-m-mind M-m-m-mind, m-m-m-mind I hallucinate when you call my name Got stars in my-
Losing oneself in the pool, in the music, in the perfume – summer causes hallucinations, a suspended state of hazy unreality, some trickery of water and light and shadow and brilliance, some spell cast by fragrance and sound and sensual effect. It’s dangerously easy to get lost just below the surface, to lose one’s mental footing, so to speak, similar to the way sharks enter tonic immobility when turned upside down. A state of peaceful paralysis that is like the call of a killer siren. You want to release and let yourself go because it feels so good, even as part of you knows there is danger ahead, and probably not that much farther ahead. Still, you keep swimming into the pleasure, into the peace, into the summer decadence. ‘Tis the damn season.
Wanna be right where you are Let’s go dancing in the dark Don’t wait, you can push to start Lose control
Kill me slowly with your kiss Wrap me ’round your fingertips Damn, I need another hit Make me lose my mind
Approaching the first turn of summer then… most times I miss it because there isn’t a dramatic demarcation, rather the slow burn of the warmth into the earth, the sun present and strong even when it’s overcast. The fun turn, when summer is at its zenith near the mid-July glory, when all you see on the horizon and for the foreseeable future is more of summer, and all that is behind you is also summer. A song to begin the bridge to our Middle Eastern-inflected section as proclaimed by my summer theme guide, my niece Emi (she who chose ‘Coquette‘ and ‘Island‘).
The idea of home in the summer is transient, like the vacations some of us take, the travels some of us make. It’s an idea more than a place, and as such summer teaches us how to make a home wherever we might be, whenever we may need it. For some of us, home is a family, a spouse, a friend, a lover. For some it is a pet, a house, a tree from our childhood. If you’re one of the lucky ones, home is yourself – a place where you always feel at ease and safe and comforted from the torments of the world. That’s the best sort of home to make – and making peace with yourself means you can feel at home wherever you might be (especially your own backyard).
Not every boat you come across is one you have to take No, sometimes standing still can be the best move you ever make
Glimmers of glory shimmer in the starry wide-eyed wonder of a little boy watching all the flashy magic playing out on the television. What might it feel like to spin in the middle of all those shards of glittering light – to be a disco ball with every light beam trained on you? Where all you have to do is spin and reflect the light back onto the world – the conduit, the vessel, the portal – resplendent in gold and mirrors and taking it all in only to give it right back in some incongruent generosity of spirit of which no one would ever quite believe you were capable. It’s not something we have come to expect of our golden icons.
My dreams of gold read differently now, and I am starting to see things from a changed point of view. My vessel is solid gold; the rest of the world and its people may be gilded, facades and shells of empty, misguided brokenness, but I somehow remain whole, I remain true. I remain solid through and through. The tacit admission is that I’m just a little tarnished – an ironic flip of all that is expected from my sparkling superficiality, from all that has admittedly come before – with the graver implication being that I was tarnished by own hand and head. Overthinking and overanalyzing are the bane to many a Virgo, and I am far from an exception to this overwrought conundrum.
Yet it is precisely at such times when I remind myself that I still have the power to enthrall and enchant, as I’m reminded by friends and strangers alike, in ways overt and covert because nobody willingly gives me any flowers despite how much they know I love them. Or maybe it’s because they know how much I love them, and love has never been easy to come by for me.
The rest of the world gets the show then, and for anyone who is still reading, that goes for you too. The ones I seek to reach are infuriatingly unaware of these spoils. My golden splendor spins with purpose only for itself, for the sake of spinning. It’s something to do, something to fill the mind when more disruptive thoughts might derail an entire summer.
“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
Summer fleeting, summer flying by, summer waiting for no man… I feel the swift rush of time in summer more than any other seasons, likely because we want it to last. Its golden splendor seeps into daily summer living, the way heat eventually comes to land in the earth and stay there until September, but once the nights turn it’s difficult to make the warmth last. For now, I let it soak into the skin, into whatever waning darkness remains in my hair like that of some silver-headed wolf.
Gold hints of Egyptian pharaohs swirl us deeper into the past, even though it was the same sun, the same earth, the same stretch of desert still baking in the heat. Sands cycling through time, indeed marking time like the trickle of an hourglass, and so go the days of our lives. Fitting, as summer meant I could reconnect to my soap operas – the entire NBC daytime line-up from ‘Days of Our Lives’ to ‘Santa Barbara’. I don’t even know how many of those shows still run, or whether it’s all streaming now or some other service I’ve ignored and allowed to leave me behind. Summer is no time to learn a new thing.
Instead, I gleefully get lost in all the golden light, embracing summer for the momentary joy at hand. Forget the other seasons if we can have this one golden summer.
