September Snapshots
A seagull swooped down and snatched the chocolate-coated granola bar from my hand as I lay exhausted on the beach after tackling the waves at high tide.
The news crews would not tell me what had happened in the house the corner of Franklin and Edgemont. ‘It’s too complicated,’ they said, ‘watch us at ten’.
I got a flat tire and had to push my bike up and down canyons in the hot noonday sun in search of a bike shop that was closed when I got there.
I have vowed never to go to the spinning class led by ‘Sandy’ on Saturday mornings because his random shouting of numbers puts me on edge.
At a dinner party I referred to myself ‘Sisyphus’ in reference to my bike-pushing odyssey.
I bought the Herald & Tribune to study the propaganda close up, the headline: ‘Hello Baby’, the picture: a soldier returning home from Iraq to the arms of his heavily pregnant wife. The love and joy shown in the relief on their faces was reminiscent of the work of Goebbles and The Blue Blouse.
We have begun putting Lime and Mango ice-lollies in our pool drinks to make frozen Margaritas.
While writing in the violet hour to the sound of sprinklers and grasshoppers I have found myself wondering if the grasshoppers have ever tried to mate with the sprinklers.
I awoke to the realization that although people had laughed at the gist of my ‘sisyphus’ comment they probably thought I was referring to myself as a ‘sissy’ in some bizarre English cultural way that immediately escaped them.
The young pygmy hippos at the zoo around the corner lost their first baby. I was sad but not surprised Francesca aborted, Elgon just will not leave her alone. He pursues her from pool to pool constantly mounting her like a trampoline.
We went to Kat’s birthday and farewell party and could not watch the news at ten so I did not find out what happened in the house on the corner of Franklin and Edgemont. The next day there was nothing at all on the Internet.
I have been reading Backpacker magazine and writing down the names of beaches in Hawaii on which you can camp in glorious seclusion.
My sleepwalking is contained if the bedroom door is closed at night.
I missed Richard Thompson and Frank Black gigs but have bought myself a ticket for the Feiry Furnaces.
After much discussion we decided to go to the restaurant we like in Pacific Beach. The girls went to get ready and I switched on the local news channel to discover the whole of P.B. had been locked down by police after a drunken bank holiday riot.
The narrator in the planetarium at the Griffith Park observatory is so awful we could not stop laughing and almost had to leave. She was clearly overwhelmed by being so close to Hollywood and the tantalizing chance of the ‘big break’ that no single word in any sentence she spoke could go unmolested by the weight of a random and misplaced emotion.
Back in Joshua Tree we climbed some rocks and looked back over a field of cacti and saw a lone Coyote walking East with that mysterious and comical dog-purpose, like a business man heading to work.
I got in touch with my Dad after weeks of missed connections to discover he’d been to Amsterdam and that yes, actually, he did have some space cake. They laughed for several hours and can’t for the life of them remember why.
A baby Panda was born down the hill from Francesca and Elgon. It's a girl. In line with Chinese tradition it will not be named until it is 100 days old. It will get a Chinese name. At the moment it looks like a small fat racoon.
