Scribbles and Photos

Bedewed in Shakespeare's Garden I am escaping New York on the cusp of a lock down due to 2011’s first monster tropical storm – Hurricane Irene.   This time, my wanderlust is taking me to a well-loved stomping ground, the California coast where I’ll be hanging with the ladies (Jackie, Nancy, and Cora).   The trip was well-timed (phew) with JFK slated to shut down today at noon and NYC already on a lock down.   It is as if Mayor Bloomberg wants to make up for all of the failures during the monster blizzard that closed out 2010 – the one that delayed my escape to Africa . The move on the flight today was Water for Elephants – a film adaptation of one of my favorite modern novels.   A love story set within a traveling circus.   Once I got over Reese Witherspoon and Robert Patterson being cast as star-crossed lovers, I settled in for what was an almost flawless film adaptation.   That is high praise from me – it is only the second time that I’ve s...

Delicate Purple  I am somewhere over the continental United States heading towards Hawaii on vacation.   I’ve been traveling since 6:00 am this morning (EDT) and it’s 4:07 EDT.   I have been doing some work writing and so am wondering if a day spent on a plan primarily doing work really counts as a vacation day. Truth be told, planes are one of the few places these days where I find the peace and quiet I need to write – maybe I should fly to Hawaii more often. Around me, people are sleeping peacefully in – I guess – something of a mid-day nap since it’s probably about that time in Hawaii .   Four hours to go on this flight and then the joy of being in paradise for the next two weeks.   Life doesn’t get better then this. Or does it? Recently, as I sat with two friends that I respect very much, the conversation turned away from work and towards the meaning of that work and what one may be giving up to do it. As my younger friend remarked, “when...

Central Park Reservoir Ok, I'll admit it, I was a little oblivious to all the talk of May 21, 2011 being Judgement Day.  My life has been hectic these past several weeks what with a major meeting and then our office was moving .   When I woke up on that Saturday morning, I did wonder aloud what I should do with my last day on earth.  One would think that I would have wanted to go out with a bang.   Clubbing anyone? Instead I had a quiet day of the sort I like at home - a lot of photography, a brisk enough walk, a little napping, and a Glee marathon. I don't really get "Glee" when I watch a single episode but i am drawn in if I stumble upon it late on a weekend afternoon and there are oodles of episodes all in a row.  There is something about the zany little Universe that encompasses the show that just captures my attention.  The whole premise is mad genius -- that is for sure.  It is a slightly off-kilter version of high school that hits ...

It's a little odd sitting in an office that has been denuded of all my personal possessions as we wait for the witching hour -- 5:00 pm when the freight elevators are magically available for our "big" office move. I am sitting in a chair that tilts a little bit to the left.  It's old and worn and being left behind as we march down Manhattan to our new digs.  Hard to believe but we've been here 11 years and five months.  The chair has served me well. I remember like it was yesterday our move into this office back in December 1999.  We were coming from a space we had outgrown on the upper East side of New York City.  That office -- unlike the office I am sitting in now -- had the advantage of being just across the street from Bloomingdale's and just above Gino's .  Gino's was a great NYC institution -- an all-cash Italian restaurant with grumpy Italian waiters from the old country.  It closed last year -- a victim of a landlord's desire to make m...

green scouts poking up silken colors unfurling stamens stand alone

Southern Iris Sir Walter Scott wrote that "Nothing is more a child of art than a garden."  I couldn't agree more.  I recently visited a couple of gardens of the southern variety in South Carolina -- one with a bit of southern history attached to it and the other a part of the legacy left to us by the Huntington family. The first, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens , is outside of Charleston.  It's been in the Drayton family since 1679.  The gardens are the creation of John Drayton who returned to Magnolia in the early 1800s and set out to create romantic gardens to make his wife -- born and bred in the north -- feel at home.  They are a wonderful setting for a plantation house that was reconstructed after the civil war.  Somewhere on the estate, the current matriarch of the Drayton family is still in residence.  I can imagine her sitting in a rocking chair on the wide porch of smaller version of the big house (which itself is a much smaller shado...

Vain Crocus (Central Park) A long time ago I took a course on writing.   It was one of those two-day intensive workshops held over a weekend.   It was not my kind of writing at all.   The premise was that we should sit with pen to paper and write for 10, 20, sometimes 30 minutes.   No re-reading, no editing, just write and see what comes out and since this was a pen to paper exercise there was no place to hide an edit.   The underlying theme was that an “edit as I go” approach was wrong – according to our teacher, it made for bad writing. Crocus on the Cusp (Central Park) I remember feeling discouraged as we completed each round of speed writing.   What I was producing was trash – something that I would “ball up” and throw into the closest wastebasket if I had my druthers.   It was two days of sheer torture for me – someone who has never written a sentence that I couldn’t see how to say it better within 15 seconds of writing it.   Tak...