My 97-year-old mother, and a cat. I know it looks like she has her back to me, but we were enjoying some reading time in the sun… and social distancing.
A few photos from that hike I took in the Oakland hills with my good friend and my godson the other day. I swear if you squint, you can see San Francisco over there in the haze.
Seriously, squint harder. It’s there.
On the way back to my mom’s house, I stopped at a farmer’s market and got a loaf of artisanal oat bread… mmmm… healthy and tasty.
No, just kidding, that is a cow pie.
And I promise…
These will be the very last…
Photos of flowers…
That I took in my mom’s garden!
But if that made you happy because you don’t care about flowers, I should probably warn you that I went to the famous Berkeley Rose Garden yesterday, and I brought my camera… and my little mister/sprayer bottle for making fake dew, so get ready for more flower pictures!!!
They enjoy each other’s company, the father giving lessons about nature without being too obvious that he is teaching anything at all.
Sometimes no word are exchanged, and the moment is enough.
The father is the kind of person who would never pass up a chance to pet a dog.
The boy is a regular boy, taller than average because of his father, but he is the kind of boy who would never pass up a good walking stick on a hike.
Birds fly far below them, over a lake at the bottom of the valley.
It is a quaint little lake, nestled in the Oakland hills.
But these are not just any people.
This isn’t just any man petting a dog.
This is not just any boy.
This is not just any dog.
This is not just any lake, captured by a telephoto lens.
This is not just any guy in the trailhead parking lot that I made pose for a photo by his customized van.
These are not just any birds.
That is not just any vulture.
And this, this is not jut any lichen and moss encrusted rock.
Okay, obviously I got carried away, but it is true that these are not just any people. That is Big Johnny, old school friend of my wife, long-time friend of me, best man at our wedding, and father to William, our godson.
So I guess what I am saying is that all those other things seemed special, because I got to spend time with those two.
In that last post, I let the butterflys… wait… butterflies? Seriously, spellchecker, that makes them sound like flies… Anyway, I let those gorgeous insects speak for themselves. This time, I will be their spokesperson. I’m sure they won’t mind.
I don’t think that one is a Monarch, but it is still nice. My great butterfly day started in my mom’s garden. I got the first few shots there, and figured I was doing pretty good, because it is hard to get a butterfly to sit still for a photo.
So I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood where I grew up.
The people next door at some point must have planted their entire front yard with magic butterfly-attracting plants.
I have never had such an easy time taking so many photos of so many butterflys… yes, I know, spellchecker, I am not playing your sick game!
There were dozens of them flying around, and they even seemed to stay on the flowers for a longer time than is usual.
And the flowers were nice too. I love the color purple.
Gotta love the zoom lens.
I cropped a few of these pictures a little, but that’s it.
Most are just as I took them.
Hello, butterfly.
I like that the tiny flowers are in focus, the butterfly is almost in focus, and the flowers in back are just blobs of purple. That is pure art… by accident.
So I borrowed my mother-in-law’s motor home to visit my mom. Is that weird? Also, is it weird that for a 60-year-old guy my legs are still so sexy?
First perk; Dew-speckled roses in the morning. Sorry, I know you have seen pictures like this, but I had a few left from my phone, that I used to text my wife and kids.
Perk #2; In a pandemic, there are no fashion rules!
And yeah… roses… covered with dew…
Perk #3; My brother Sid, who is helping my mom out, brings me meals in the backyard at dinner time. My mom has a friend whose husband works for a guy who has three triplet daughters that raise chickens. Their mother is Asian, and she goes to the Asian market and grabs up all the green stuff that has fallen off the vegetable. Then, she goes to a famous bakery around these parts, and gets the really old bread.
Yup, the chickens have only eaten imported Asian vegetables and fancy bread crumbs. My mom’s friend brought some eggs, all different colors, so my brother made free-range, yuppie-chicken-egg French toast. Yes, it was as good as it sounds.
Oh, and there are these roses in the backyard.
Perk #4; If I stand by the big back windows and look inside, it is almost like being in there. I can see the sunset… sort of!
Perk #5; Last night, my brother did a real caveman bar-b-que, using real oak wood from our tree in the front yard.
I don’t know if you are jealous, but you ought to be.
Perk #6; I make new friends, and not just the birds that I sit out here taking pictures of. He is warming his tail in the sun.
I named him Jimmy, after one of the crack squirrels that live inside my head. You would know all about Jimmy if you listened to my podcast.
Perk #7; In my endless quest to invent the perfect drink, this is my newest creation. It is strawberry lemonade with a little honey and some rum, heated up.
Help me come up with a name for it.
Perk #8; I got to see Andy, an old childhood friend, down at the dog park, where I petted lots of dogs… in a socially-distant responsible way, of course.
To be honest, I am not a fan of blogs that feature pets being spoken for by their owners, no matter how cute the dog, and how clever the commentary. But these dogs aren’t mine. Also, I am a rebel and a rule-breaker.
The pelicans were practicing their formation flying.
A cormorant was diving for fish.
The Golden Gate was very golden.
The sunset was nice.
San Francisco Bay was majestic.
The colors were vibrant.
The fog looked more like fog and less like fire smoke.
I was back to the place I love the most.
And my friend Andy, who grew up on the street where I grew up, stopped by with his wife, Sue. Also, it was a dog park, so there will be pictures of dogs… oh yeah.
A city wreathed in mist, or maybe the smoke from the many fires burning through the west.
Beautiful and yet hard to see, so close and so far at the same time, like sanity and normalcy these days. Will the craziness drift away, fade, and seem like a dim dream, or will the haze grow thicker, last longer, obscure the beauty until it too is just a memory?
That could be any city. The form is still strong, the steel and stone skeleton, and it is still teeming with life. But are those lives the same as they once were? Are they as good as they used to be, as good as they could be again?
The water still laps at the shore, the mountains still rise in the indistinct distance.
Information is still being spread out into the ether, but what confused information it is, squabbling like an old, unhappy married couple, calling each other liars until no one knows the truth anymore.
The bridge still connects the headlands, less traveled because of the sickness spreading faster than the wildfires over this world.
Time will pass, time will tell.
Life does go on. Strangely subdued people in masks still walk their dogs in the pale sunshine.
The vast water still sparkle, diluted by melting icecaps, and bereft of so many species.
The seagulls do not care who is in charge, knowing that civilizations come and go.
A living city will someday be just bones, sifted through by those to come.
In the times to come, other fishermen will come to the waters near this place… but what language will they speak, and what nation call their home?
The old plum tree on the top level of our backyard. Every year, mom would say “don’t eat too many plums” and every year at least two of us, my three brothers and I, would get tummy aches… or worse. But oh, the magic of that gnarled old tree with the lichen and Spanish moss hanging on it.
It is trimmed for winter now, but when it is in full dangling growth, it is a cave, a grotto, a hideout for adventurous games of all sorts.
Flowers were magical then, but in other ways than they are now. They were a splash of blurry color to brighten our wild adventures, they were set decorations for jungle exploring on a tropic isle, beset by cannibals and pirates.
Birds were magical.
I mean, come on, they can fly.
A flower was just a part of the wildlands that was our garden back then, when it seemed so much bigger, bigger than it could ever have possibly been.
A vine-covered metal fence was a cage where they locked us savage seafarers up, and from which we had to make our escape.
Damp leaves were our friends, our hiding places, our building materials.
We didn’t see many squirrels back then. Squirrels are strangely reluctant to approach a pack of wild boy-children at play.
Our jungle island was lush, our forests deep and dark.
Full of wild creatures and wilder men.
The garden was full of underground tunnels and hand-made forts. Wars were fought, truces made and broken. As we got older, and made many friends in the neighborhood, our range expanded, but still, we found our way back to this garden, as I still do today.
Because this garden is as much a home as the house behind which it sits.
Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Pouring My Art Out 