Starfish
By Eleanor Lerman
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who say, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?
Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.
And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
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I've been up since before 6 a.m. Monday because we had to take the minivan to Toyota to find out why the engine service light was on -- turns out it was an O2 sensor that set it off, but the real problem is a leak in the coolant system that requires a part shipped from Oregon and a lot of money to fix. So after a couple of hours waiting in a nice service area with free coffee, cookies, and travel mugs, we took a Lyft back to the apartment at lunchtime and will take another one to retrieve the van hopefully tomorrow.
It was otherwise a lovely day, not a cloud in the sky and not too warm. I took a walk after lunch to get the mail (I got presents from Kristen and Lyndita, plus an Our Flag Means Death shoulder bag I had ordered to find my people at festivals, yay) and saw frogs and turtles, then we took a walk to the beach in the afternoon to see the geese, ducks, and herons. Now we're watching Les Miserables -- the sexy Liam Neeson/Geoffrey Rush one with no singing -- in honor of the date. Sea stars from Mukilteo on Saturday:
I got to spend a lot of Wednesday with Cheryl, including lunch at Mosaic Cafe, watching Fire Island (yes, again) and Reminiscence (because of Hugh) with ice cream in between, and spotting two bunnies in front of the Airbnb. Before she arrived, I got some work done and even managed a few minutes on chat with two of my high school friends.
After she had to go home, Paul -- who went in to the local office for the last time and picked up anti-anxiety meds for the cats -- and I went over to the house to attach a new extension cord to the sump pump and said goodbye to our neighbors the Wigles. Then we ate a very late dinner and watched the Iconic America episode about Fenway Park on PBS.
Gift
By Hilda Conkling
This is mint and here are three pinks
I have brought you, Mother.
They are wet with rain
And shining with it.
The pinks smell like more of them
In a blue vase:
The mint smells like summer
In many gardens.
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Quickie after another very busy, social day starting with coffee and a croissant at Filicori Zecchini with two of my high school friends, Linda and Stephanie, followed by Playa Bowls with Toby, whom I met in Baby Gap when we both had infants and who invited me to join her baby group when she discovered I didn't know anyone else with an infant in the area. Then I stopped in Giant, outside of which I ran into my mom, and came back to the Airbnb to find Paul's work being supervised by the cats.
We took a walk, then went for dinner with my friends Angela, Lena, and Carrie at the Brooklyn Deli and intended to get Baskin Robbins for dessert for old time's sake like we used to do after Lebanese Taverna, but the one that has just moved to Park Potomac wasn't open yet. So we chatted outside, then I came back here to fold laundry and watch Fire Island, which Kay told me was based on Pride and Prejudice, something I hadn't realized from the trailer. From the walk, meals out, and the supervisors:
Quickie since I spent most of the evening in Tysons Corner at a free screening of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which I somehow won from being on a Warner Bros mailing list. We left the house more than two hours early, yet there was already a line when we reached the theater, and so early that we wound up eating pizza and Beyond Nuggets in the auditorium rather than run around the food court. A friend from my local Pokemon group was working the event, so we wound up sitting in great seats in the reviewer section.
I feel ambivalent talking about the movie itself. I support people who refuse to see it because JKR is a TERF who supports organizations that do awful damage to trans women, and I know other people who refuse to see it because Warner Bros fired Johnny Depp as Grindelwald but not Amber Heard as Mera in Aquaman. Frankly, I can't stand Depp or Heard after all the things they've both admitted, though I'm not boycotting either one, and I won't pay for anything Rowling does, but I can't erase Harry Potter from my past, either -- and this was free.
The film is lovely to look at, has Jude Law onscreen almost as much as Eddie Redmayne which is my preference, has by far the best canonical gay representation in any HP story though in some ways it's still unsatisfactory, has a plot with [magical] animals that I found disturbing especially on the big screen, has humor but some of it drags a bit, and has Mads Mikkelsen who's so much more effective as Grindelwald than Depp that I didn't miss the latter at all, especially since they started with Colin Farrell, so the shapeshifting wasn't odd.
I never got very invested in any of the couples -- nay, any of the characters -- in the previous two films, so if you are, you might find this one frustrating until the very end. Kowalski gets lots of screen time but not exactly character development while the sisters from earlier in the franchise are barely there. On the other hand, there's lots more Lally Hicks and Theseus gets to be more interesting than I found him in the previous two movies. I'll admit that brief Hogwarts views and music excited me more than a lot of the newer stuff.
Oh, and we just watched the Billions season finale while I typed this. It smelled kind of fishy last week when Prince 1) slept with someone other than the wife he's obsessed with then 2) announced he was running for president, and this week it absolutely reeked of shark-jumping, with ridiculous dialogue and even more ridiculous behavior from most of the major characters. We'll see if we even bother with next season.
