California Christmases

Usually, we've left LA for New Mexico by now, but we're waiting for Moth to be seen by her cat dentist again in order to be given (we hope) a travel All Clear.  This means that in other years, we've always missed the local Holiday Block Party on Griffith Park Boulevard (which largely seems to be full of many bouncy castles, and a small tent of people playing jazz, and - well, we were there a bit too late for Santa, or the food and drink, but clearly it's mostly for the under 10s and their parents).  I would love to take that top picture and blow it up - what looks at first glance like a naked man is actually a woman with a handbag and small child looking for all the world like it's 1963.  Then at the bottom - how to re-purpose your small dinghy as a Christmas tree, with a palm tree in the background ...

My first sense that Californian - even American - Christmases were somewhat different from the UK came in around 1963, I should think, with the arrival of a Christmas card from an old Birmingham University friend of my father's, John Lerry - who for some reason moved to the US in 1952, and then in 1960 took up a job as Manager of Construction and Engineering at Stanford (I do not have a phenomenal memory ... his obituary was easy to find online, and it's a marker of the weirdness, to me, of his Christmas card that I remember his name).  On it were his three preternaturally blond children sitting round a Christmas tree, with unwrapped presents - presumably it had been taken the previous year, and banked for this very purpose.  Back then, in the early 60s in England, one simply did not, ever, put a family photo on a Christmas card - this seemed like a quintessentially strange American thing to do.  Little did I think that sixty or so years later I'd be strolling down a street a few blocks away (little did I yet know the term "blocks," of course) and looking at scenes as foreign as these, in a temperature that was still hovering around 70.

 

wreath

I still find it strange to be on the cusp of Christmas and everything to be so green and leafy in many places, including our front yard.  I bought a little evergreen wreath for the front door, but I think I may move this back there from its bush: the door wreath looks too shy and modest,

 

balcony

Seen on my ride home: a second floor balcony Christmas door wreath and bicycle parking, on S. Hoover St.  I'm not sure why I find this so satisfying: the shapes, the evening light?  

 

dappled

 

In some intangible way, this stands in for me today - dessicated in spirit after a long graduate studies directors' meeting, and wondering if the semester will ever end, to the extent that I feel that I may be merging into the building, unable any more to tell the shadow from the substance.

the parsley forest

... as seen from inside the kitchen window.  If there's one thing that grows in the rather shady light of the kitchen windowbox, it's parsley.  There's also more parsley growing on the terrace below.  It's not that we eat large quantities of the stuff, but it grows like mad.  And, whilst on the topic of parsley, I'm wondering why it is that - in the US at least - curly parsley ((Petroselinum crispum) is so rarely seen, when once upon a time (and of course my memory is here stretching back to England), there were little sprigs of the stuff plonked on top of all kinds of dishes as Garnish, and it was ground up in the parsley mincer and stirred into white sauce in order to be served with ham.  I never much cared for ham, but I certainly enjoyed parsley sauce.  I'm sure Italian flat leafed parsley could be substituted and have just about the same flavor ...

 

work isn't going well

Gramsci is, of course, adorable, right down to his little white paws.  But when I am trying to finish off the first triage-ing run through of graduate admissions, and answer a sudden flurry of Hi Professor emails, to have him determinedly lodged between me and the computer, or persistently bringing one of his little mice up onto the desk so that I can throw it for him, is ... exhausting.

 

retirement orchid

Alice's retirement celebrations have meant a wonderful few days: tonight, out to dinner with a very good friend (who made some of the best red cabbage with apple, vinegar etc in the universe).  Here is a wonderful orchid gift from some other dear friends, which greeted Alice to her complete delight when she came back on Thursday evening, and which, having been moved around the house and tried out in various light-filled places, has now taken up residence in the kitchen.  I'm sure the reality of the fact that actual retirement doesn't take place until January 6th (excuse for more dinners! more seeing New Mexican friends) will kick in rather too hard when the grading for her two classes arrives at the end of the week, but the first installment - the end-of-teaching installment - has been pretty fine.