a wedding bouquet

At the time of the fires, in January, I moved a lot of things - like paintings - into my office at USC, and now I'm slowly moving most of them back.  But some objects - like old photographs, and old family memorabilia, seem safer there, or at least less combustible.  On the other hand, since Taper Hall can have dicey water pipes ... I've been moving them into my deepest filing cabinet.  Today, I unearthed my paternal grandmother's wedding bouquet ... or at least a fragment of it: the actual bouquet (some wedding photos emerged a few minutes later) was a magnificent creation.

The wedding was on May 24th 1920: Gran would have been just 21, and Joe, my father's father, 29.  He'd been back from the First World War for a year and a half.  They were married in the Primitive Methodist Church in Hunslet, Leeds (my grandmother's family were Methodist; his C of E), and then, by the look of it, returned to her family home at 22 Cranbrook Avenue, Beeston - also in Leeds - which is where they then lived.  My uncle Don was born just over a year later; my father in 1923.  It's unbearable to think that by the end of 1928, their father was dead - he looks so happy and full of life, here.  But he caught pneumonia in a flu epidemic, and his lungs had been damaged by gas in WW1 (so the family story that was passed on to me by my mother went - but she was an unreliable narrator) - but whatever, that was it - leaving Gran with two very small boys.

They look rather solemn here - but I cheered them up a little with Photoshop's colorizing smart filter ...

 

obscurity and obliteration

The demise of Wood pizza restaurant - seemingly an economic casualty, like so much - has left a torn postered, graffiti scarred, dead tree environment, which seems like a visual metaphor for so much about the country.  And there am I, trying to talk about the Ruskin-Whistler trial, aestheticism, and Pater's aesthetic beliefs all in one 100-minute segment (with class discussion in groups, in which they all battled with different segments of Whistler's Ten O'Clock lecture, quite successfully), and wondering quite how to make it speak to the state of things today, beyond dropping in some asides about being able to visit The Peacock Room, say, in the Smithsonian's Freer/National Museum of Asian Art, assuming the Smithsonian is still opening by the time they get there ... On the other hand, a class period talking about Victorian art is, at the very minimum, a little spell when I, at least, am not glued glumly to the news cycle (and yes, that case of tariff-beating French/Italian/Spanish wine arrives tomorrow from wine.com ...)

 

next door ... coming soon!

The vans full of Staging Furniture were there bright and early this morning, and apparently were there all day ... any moment now, we will be officially looking for new neighbors.  The screen writer next door realised that much though she loved the house, it somehow wasn't suitable for two very tiny children (given that it's on a steep hill, and is all stairs, inside and out, with no flat outside play space whatsoever, you'd have thought that she might have considered that before buying it in the first place, but people are ... well, let's just say that she must have fallen in love with the view).

 

not the real thing, BUT ...

Two nights ago, I was down in my study, working ... and Gramsci was convinced there was a mouse sharing our space.  He was fixated on the area under my mother's old desk, behind the books, behind more books... Admittedly, sometimes I thought I heard a very slight rustling - but it could have been a large moth (or, worse, still, a cockroach), but on balance, I thought it best (or cowardly) ignored.  

No sounds yesterday, although Gramsci was strangely fixated when we went to bed.  Usually he climbs onto my chest, into my arms, purrs.  Last night ... he fetched the red mouse (seen above), shook it, chased it on and off the bed, and eventually fetched another (yellow) mouse from a different part of the room, and repeated the performance.

Was he trying to tell me something?  Surely.  This morning, he disappeared down to my study, pre-breakfast.  I was trying to leave by 6.30, a long and painful dental appointment awaiting me on the other side of town.  Then at 6.29, I found him in the dining room, guarding the sweetest and unharmed (physically, that is - who knows about psychological scars?) little field mouse hiding behind the door.  She was captured under a plastic bowl, and escorted to a safe space down the garden.

Grammy is very pleased with himself.  Myself, I'm blown away by what he was telling me through that role play with the toy mice.

 

sniffing spring

In truth, it was a grey, gloomy, and very chilly day, which began with some light rain.  All the same, the wisteria is out down the street, and so is the - is it a gardenia?  Alice is sniffing it, hoping to find out.  

 

abandoned?

Or, more likely, dropped, and rescued, and left for her ... does one say "owner," for a doll as self-possessed as this one?  "Person"?  ... to come and find her again.  By Silver Lake reservoir, which seems to be a positive mecca for lost toys, but this one is lifelike enough to make one hunt for some kind of narrative, some kind of metaphor, here.

 

The Poet's Wife

She's out right on time: all that rain a few weeks ago encouraged her.  I still don't know which poet - the David Austin website doesn't explain, although it does inform one that she has 77 petals, which seems rather special.