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.

 

elderly tulips

When flowers get a bit too drooping and weary to carry on doing well inside, then we put them in a kind of half-way house, on the table in the front yard.  Here our Thanksgiving tulips are living out their final days in a kind of decorous retirement.  It's also indicative of the fact that yes, we are spoilt by having California sun right into December ...

a geranium placeholder

At breakfast today, the sun was hitting a geranium leaf just so.  And I thought - any other day, I would have bagged that as my p of the d - picture of the day - and have felt content.  But ... I knew what I wanted: a good picture of Alice at her Jubilación dinner - I took her to Musso & Frank, where I'd never been, and it was wonderful.  But could I take a good picture?  No.  Not as bad as yesterday, when I had to crop her out of the group pic because she was munching on a cheese straw, and that just wouldn't have done.  But tonight - I didn't want to make a big deal of it, but to take a quick shot or two, and put my cell phone away, and - well, no.  It just didn't capture the evening, alas.  But the geranium?  That, I guess, encapsulates my long-lasting photo taking maxim: just capture those moments of fleeting beauty or strangeness when you see them.

 

last day of school! Alice's jubilación

Today was Alice's last ever day of teaching.  So I wasn't going to let the day go unmarked, of course ... and gathered a little group who surprised her - really surprised her - jumping out of a classroom at her after she ended the final class, with disco balloons and flowers, and marched her off to the Art History Seminar Room, where champagne and wine and a hastily gathered assortment of snacks from TJs were consumed, and a Spotify playlist of Black Funk Disco put on, and her health drunk.  I discovered yesterday that the Faculty Club would be closed - my original plan had been to go there - but this was much more fun, it turned out.

And jubilación is so much more sun as a word than the ominous Retirement, so I decided to go with the Spanish.

Of course, Alice still has grading to do, and her office to empty, and so on - but this, really, is It.  More celebrations follow ...

 

end of semester, end of an era

Three very hastily snatched photos to commemorate today: our Art History Holiday Party.  In the past, this has been a spectacular event - at the Gamble House, the LA Athletic Club, the Grammy Museum.  But this year - university strict budget rules - we weren't allowed to spend any funds on such an event.  So instead, a faculty-sponsored event in the University Club, which didn't have the same glitz, by any means (though I have to say that the Chipotle Margarita may have been the best drink I've ever had on any of these occasions).  And we weren't huge in numbers, this year, so it was actually very friendly and comfortable.

But what made it so poignant, and indeed awful, is that our two wonderful office admin staff, Beth and Tracey, won't be with us going forwards.  Beth has been given a position running Scheduling and Staffing for all the Humanities - that means lining up classes, faculty, and rooms, and is a logistical fiddly nightmare that makes cat herding look like an orderly procession.  Tracey - as of this moment, inexplicably, and cruelly, nada.  Our Office Manager will be shared with two other departments - and who, but who, will do all the manifold tasks that have to be done that Beth and Tracey have been so good at?  More than that - much more than that - they've been instrumental in making the department one of the friendliest, most cohesive, welcoming, caring, and efficient places that I've ever worked in.  I couldn't have been Chair as much, or DGS, without them.  I feel that the administration's shift to a new, streamlined managerial system (and yes, it comes with much managerial speak) has been carried out in a ruthless and cruel way. with the minimum of consultation of the people it affects the most.  We owe Beth and Tracey so much: they were quietly feted earlier in the day, and I'm so very pleased that they came to celebrate (hold a wake?) with us all this evening.

 

Mothy - recovering well!

For a cat who's been through major dental surgery, Moth is recovering remarkably well - quite possibly better than us.  She had us very worried in the night - sitting in her litter tray - could she pee? could she not?  and by one in the morning, we were stumbling around wondering whether to call the emergency vet, or rush her off there - and then we realized that yes, she had peed ... but the uncertainty remained during the first part of the day, at a time when Alice was still at home, but I was starting the beginning process of navigating the administrative reorganization and chaos that has been dealt us (oh yes, and teaching, and meeting with my honors student, and all the rest of it).  But all's well now.  Gramsci still thinks that she smells very strange, and is wary of her (probably a good thing), and we hope that we'll soon be able to breathe again.

 

Moth's day at the dentist

As many of you know, I've spent an inordinate amount of time over the last decade or so having complicated dental work done.  Today it was Moth's turn to go to a specialty dentist ...

(she had dental resorption, which is basically like a kind of decay from below).

I love my dentists - my main dentist, anyway, and the more sadistic one has done plenty of technically very good work.  But no one has ever written my name both inside and outside the surgery room;

nor prepared a folder for me with my name illuminated (with a drawing of a moth);

nor texted Alice with a picture of my dentistry team, presumably since I don't look quite so cute in the dentist's chair.  (Moth's dentist comes from Manchester, quite bizarrely.  Or not bizarrely - a quick bit of googling tells me he used to be married to Sophie Ward - actor, writer, Simon Ward's daughter - before she got involved with the playwright Rena Brannan.  That's somehow a very LA story, and I don't know whether Moth was aware of all of it).

Our dear cat seems to have made it through ok - she's home, more than a little wobbly, but ravenously hungry.