"August Slipped Away . . .

like a bottle of wine."  There's no better month in the Pines and Taylor Swift's lyric captures its ineffability perfectly in a lyric from her incredible "Folklore."

Thom color coordinated his outfit for a visit to Victor's to pick up some of his freshly grown tomatoes.

We enjoyed some new appetizers, including Varick's spinach-feta cheese tart.

Everybody pitched in to make this black cherry-pistachio salad with charred scallion vinaigrette.

Varick and I played Scrabble, of course.  Can you find the misspelled word?

Avoiding an abundance of poison ivy this summer en route to the Grove has led to the discovery of previously unphotographed house names.

The Belvedere lions took their cue from Patience & Fortitude who, by the way, seem to have lost their blue masks.

Sailor's Haven was hopping on a Tuesday afternoon when an empty Empress pulled into the harbor to ferry beachgoers back to Sayville.

Spruced up concessions tempted kids with ice cream

. . . while a bar right next door to the National Park Service served booze to their parents.

People partied from their docked boats, too.

Everybody pretty much ignored the orange infrastructure to encourage social distance while boarding.

The Great South Bay is about to swallow the Sunken Forest boardwalk.

It already has reclaimed the old concrete sidewalk.

A grazing deer and her fawn seemed pretty chill.

Salt spray from tropical storm Isaias, which lacked a cleansing downpour on Fire Island, took a toll on some of the vegetation.

A beach still life for my bicycle collection.

The National Park Service whitewashed the abandoned Coast Guard house within days of my arrival.  

Political considerations, no doubt, must have motivated the agency's action given frequently expressed solidarity in both the Pines and Cherry Grove.

I'm more a product of the flower power school.

How To Build A Girl (4*)

Caitlin Moran leaves no doubt that girls like to spank the monkey as much boys which I found a little shocking until I started laughing.  Loudly.  

Thankfully, around that time I decided to combat my burgeoning underarm odor issues by shoplifting a bottle of Mum roll-on deodorant, and realize on the bus on the way home that it was shaped--astonishingly, usefully, blatantly--like a cheerful, chunky cock.  With its pink domed lid and carefully contoured bottle, the thinking behind British teenage girls' most popular deodorant of the late 1980s was a truth hidden in plain views:  Proctor & Gamble were selling adolescent girls Starter Dildos for 79p.

Did they know?  Of course they knew.  The knew--and they were playing mind games with us.  For what reason--other than a knowing sadistic streak--would they have named something millions of teenage girls were rapping themselves with "Mum"?  It was their way of fucking with our minds.  The real test of how horny we were.  Are you so desperate that you'd have sex with your Mum?  To which my simple answer was--locking the bedroom door and lying on the floor--"Yes."

But optimism is equally critical in building Dolly, a smart, insecure woman who chooses her fake first name with as much panache as she wears a top hat.  Moran somehow manages to integrate the kind of self-help shit that usually has me rolling my eyes into a feel-good coming of age story.

We're just, simply, in the world.  It never occurred to me what a wonderful thing this was. Or perhaps it did, a long time ago--but I had forgotten.  I am so happy to be alive.  That the point of life is joy--to make it, to receive it.  That the earth is a treasure box of people and places and song, and that every day you can plunge your arms in and find a new, ridiculous, perfect delight.

***

Until--slowly, slowly--you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day.  You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things.  What your nurture began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely--as you're too busy doing, now.  And ten years will pass without you even noticing.

***

But one day you'll find a version of you that will get kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.

On occasion, she's even profound.  Like when Dolly discovers what family support of her self-fulfilling choices has cost them.

I'm learning a whole new thing:  that sometimes, love isn't observable or noisy or tangible. That sometimes, love is anonymous.  Sometimes, love is silent.  Sometimes, love just stands there when you're calling it a cunt, biting its tongue and waiting.

Nick Hornby, watch out.

Pandemic Potpourri

Daily walks in Central Park

 

Signs of the times

Protests

A bike ride to the Towers, Thom's apartment in Jackson Heights

Home improvement at 47 Pianos, including:

Repainting all rooms and purchasing a new sofa

Refinishing a butcher block table and bentwood chairs

Recovering a leather chair and adding berry cream accents, like the plaster-of-Paris fan stand in the background.

Repositioning family heirlooms, including these brass horses

Restoring this tension calendar, a treasured gift I received in high school when my mother was still alive (Jo Ann Harman also gave me my first Aubrey Beardsley repro, hanging above).  It required  handcrafting all the paper and string and elements. In retirement, I finally have enough time to remember to change the date every morning.  How analog is that?  Time stops in my apartment when I'm gone.

Affixing shells to an old astray that David rescued when he worked on what today is known as Theater Row on West 42nd Street

Decoupaging too many flat surfaces with exhumed Playbills from nearly 50 years of theatre-going, beginning with Pacific Overtures on Broadway (1976).

 

Repainting my bedroom after purchasing a new bed, chest of drawers, rug and my first flat screen TV.

More decoupage in the cylinder at the foot of my bed, using a naughty calendar from the wonderful but now defunct Butt magazine.

I began the makeover of 47 Pianos early last year, hoping to swap it with someone elsewhere in the world for a month at a time.  That won't be happening anytime soon.