josé

He would have been nineteen this month.

Happy birthmonth.

I miss you, little boy.

frank's going away party in pictures

sidewalk art says: bon voyage, frank. orange county, ca 1,001.4 miles. that way.


lovely glass bead gift from sue...



guests...







lots of great conversation...






and after dinner, what's a party without fire dancing in the backyard?

peach.










a bit o' fire eating...



this picture that includes the twinkle lights running along kat's fence makes it kind of look like frank's eating fire too...



and (since this is for frank) there must be ice cream. and magic shell.



and whipped cream...



lots of whipped cream...





and there must be a beatles sing-along...








if you don't know the song, you can always stand in the background with your phone...



thanks to kathy for hosting and to peach for performing and creating our chalk welcome mat and to everyone for making it a lovely time. best going-away party ever. now, let's not let him go...

our anniversary in pictures

must start with champagne...


champagne plus strawberry...



lots of foaming happens...


breakfast...


work on the wedding scrapbook begins again...



by this, our fourth anniversary, we have completed seven pages...


no pictures of dressing up for a lovely dinner - stephen white linen, me 1940s and little purse with buttons...

no pictures of said lovely dinner - stephen lamb shank, me quinoa, wild mushrooms, truffle oil...

no pictures of dessert and veuve clicquot and watching the wedding video...

but indeed pictures of the cards we made for each other. mine was superimposing myself instead of the beautiful sparrow on stephen's latest painting. that's me in my wedding dress and i tried to do a photoshoppy paintish effect on the me, but it all lost too much detail for him to see it was me there, so i left myself in photo realism...


and the pièce de résistance, stephen's card to me...

...

It falls fast. Always surprises you. This year, it surprises me even though Stephen said so just the other day. "Days are getting shorter," but I hadn't noticed yet. This morning the alarm went off at 5:30 and I went walking around the house in the black. Stephen hates the end of summer, but I've never minded. Usually just looked forward to the autumn leaves. The smoky smell. The California in people doesn't always affect them in the same ways. Some people who come from that kind of sun seem to need sun all the time. I don't know why, but for me it was mostly the opposite, sun, sun, sun all the time until I just wanted to live in a perpetual drizzle. But this morning at 5:30 it's dark and the end is coming and for once it hurts that it's going.

fun with powells' photo booth

Right now, Powell's has a little attraction going on where you can have your picture taken superimposed in front of our entrance and with your name, or whatever else you want, on the marquee. With [my brother] Frank so soon to leave town, I said we should get in line and have a kooky Powell's picture together.


The choking was his idea.

But wait, there's more. You must look close. If we zero in a bit, you see...


And then we bring it in just a bit closer...

circus scrapbook

I've been working on building a website. Or working with my excellent web-designer Charles Dye who is building it--and who is being so patient and accommodating throughout the process. He's made this whole thing a great experience, but more on that later. Last night my goal was to find whatever pictures I might have, stuffed in my boxes, stuffed in my storage unit, of my time in the circus.

If you've had as many incredible experiences as I have and you're a writer at heart, you can't not write about them. And I thought it would be fun to include some pictures from those days on my website. I don't have much. When I ran away from the circus, I left most everything behind. But in one box, along with a couple children's books and Bob Dylan's biograph record set, I found a scrapbook.

We made it for my mom and dad, back in the day, but apparently it came back to me. Of course this was a scrapbook and it was simply doing what a scrapbook is supposed to do, but I was struck by how representative it was of that time in my life. Most of it was various newspaper clippings charting various treks across the country, but here and there were photographs, a program showing the rundown of a performance, a coloring book I designed for a show, a route sheet showing exactly where we went and when. Tiny glimpses in newsprint of people I used to know. Ghosts of personal stories that were mine then and, as I write about them now, become mine in a new way.

I picked Stephen up from work at eleven. The night was cool for the first time in a couple days and we threw open the windows to finally get the heat out of the apartment, and we sat on the bed with the scrapbook. As I paged through, he looked and sometimes smiled and sometimes gave out this funny laugh that I've known him long enough to be able to read. I'd say, "Why do my pictures make you laugh in horror?"

Sometimes he'd say, "Well, clowns are scary."

And one time he said, of a showgirl picture, "Your legs look like sausages."

And then explained that it was only because I was wearing multiple layers of tights and they were taking away some of the shape of my legs and he said he'd worn multiple layers of tights before, too, and he knew what they do to legs.

But mostly he'd say that this person on the page--this clown in white face and red nose, this circus girl posing in her big hair--was someone he didn't know. He couldn't connect the me in the book with the me sitting next to him. It was strange for me to see, too. This person I used to be.

cool displays at powell's

These need no commentary, so I won't give them any. Except to say that these are two cool displays by my team mates that I've come across recently, walking the rooms in Powell's. There, see? That's all I'm going to say. Take a look...

The Purple Room: histories and social science...

The Gold Room: genre fiction...

a pint of chocolate

Had to steal this quote from the site of a blog I follow:

"If any man has drunk a little too deeply from the cup of physical pleasure; if he has spent too much time at his desk that should have been spent asleep; if his fine spirits have become temporarily dulled; if he finds the air too damp, the minutes too slow, and the atmosphere too heavy to withstand; if he is obsessed by a fixed idea which bars him from any freedom of thought: if he is any of these poor creatures, we say, let him be given a good pint of amber-flavored chocolate.... and marvels will be performed."

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Did a little wiki-lookie, and it seems this famous gourmand studied law, chemistry and medicine... took on his second surname because an aunt left him a bunch of money on the condition that he take her name... was once an elected mayor... played first violin in the Park Theater in New York... and once had a bounty on his head.