a couple trips around the sun
SUMMER 2011
The stoplight at the bottom of the offramp was dead, as were the next two, at the grocery store and the high school. Not flashing red but three blank black eyes. Cars did the stop-and-go, politely taking turns.
Record heat and humidity was roasting September. Air-conditioners had sucked all the juice out of the wires, I figured, for the first but probably not the last time this summer. Three miles to go. Maybe it’s just these guys and not us? My garage door clicker clicked uselessly. Crap.
FALL 2011
Things in my life seem to happen in fits and starts, like tremors along a fault line. Months and years go by with only an occasional rumble, a wiggle, and then suddenly I hear that train-coming sound and the chandeliers are swinging. Once in a while it’s big enough that the pantry’s glass containers fly to become shards on the kitchen floor, winking like jagged crystal islands in a lake of olive oil, soy sauce and red chili paste.
The current earthquake swarm – they call them that, did you know? same as bees – started about a year ago when my stepmother Margery was actively dying, the extent of the awful mess she’d made of things in her years-long oxygen-deprived state was becoming all too clear and my brother first had surgery to remove the cancer in his throat all in one deceptively beautiful September. As I wrote through the winter, my desk chair would rock and dance, reminding me not to trust even the ground.
JANUARY 2012
These days I feel like I’m riding an old playground carousel pushed by a mean Big Kid. Unn-ugh, unn-ugh. Just when it slows enough to wobble and clunk, when I think if I open my eyes I won’t puke, those fat pink hands grab the rail and fling it again – unn-UGH – and I brace hard with my heels and ride the embossed sheet steel plate, hard bumps under my thighs, dead cold through my jeans, trying not to slide off into the clammy sand, the cutting gravel. And I wonder why it’s impossible to string two sentences together these days?
Winter is apparently out of whack too, appearing only at night. The temperatures at midnight have been just above freezing since November, the moon sharp and pale in the cloudless sky. The days are undecided, neither spring nor fall and certainly not winter: dry and eggshell blue; they seem resigned to being unassigned to a season; they wait but not expectantly.
SUMMER 2012
It’s been a perfect July, weather goddess summer eighties warm, fogless nights, no haze on the horizon. One becomes complacent. Thursday was for errands and driving to and fro: 56, I5, S9.
Some trips are only about speed, the shortest distance between two points, the freeway-only route. Others are an impulse turn and swaying into the curves on the cut road in the sandstone bluff, past the last pines until the ocean on the right and the salt marsh on the left slams into view, a surprise assault and the smell of incoming tide. Sliding down the two-lane toward the old bridge that spans the inlet, a heron high-stepping in the slough and blue barrels rolling onto a compliant beach, the sand taking the mad energy and sending tame water sliding back. The Pacific is blues from a crayon memory, a paintbox, a garden – cornflower, turquoise, a Los Gatos sky. Far out the sea is a mercury slick, the wet pelt of a silver sea lion as big as a county, barely breathing in the stunning afternoon.
Sometimes while I’m working on a piece of writing, I’ll flip back through notes I’ve saved in a file named Random. I did that yesterday (while stuck on a paragraph I’d rewritten four times, apparently to punish it), and I found these bits from some recent seasons. They seemed to want to be together.
Posted in: casa de swell, human beans, my baby brother
Tags: adobe soup, aging, cancer, candace mann, del mar, earthquake, earthquake swarm, fall, la jolla, pacific ocean, power outage, sea lions, seasons, southern california, summer, summer fall winter spring, torrey pines beach, winter
What people are saying: 36 Comments
08.28.2012 - 4:56 pm
Well of course they go together.
I really hate that earthquakes swarm.
I have a Random file, too. Did I learn that from you? xoxo
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 5:11 pm
or i learned it from you.
the very recent earthquake swarm is what spawned this whole episode. at least they’re good for something. xoxo
08.28.2012 - 5:20 pm
I have been on that same merry-go-round myself Candace. I just hope it slows down this Fall…maybe Winter…who knows. BTW…love this place and I do love reading your words.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 5:28 pm
glad to hear it’s not just me! i’m always delighted to see you, david.
08.28.2012 - 5:39 pm
I should have taken notes.
Now I just string thoughts and memories together. Some true.
The better ones less true but more colorful.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 5:41 pm
if you’re gonna lie, it must be colorful. isn’t that a commandment or something? thanks for fibbing, aka.
08.28.2012 - 5:46 pm
A lot can happen in a couple trips around the sun. Hell, a lot can happen in a couple seconds, but such short units of time don’t allow us to capture them in word paintings the way you so gracefully do.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:15 pm
i wish i could design gardens as fast as i can (sometimes) write. thank you for being such a good backstop, gardener jeff.
08.28.2012 - 6:16 pm
Sigh. I love everything you put together.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:15 pm
ditto, joanie. xo
08.28.2012 - 6:26 pm
Decent writing (mostly) and an interesting concept. Keep it up!
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:15 pm
thank you, glasses cat man!
08.28.2012 - 6:39 pm
The part about the playground wheel was wonderful. I’d forgotten about those, and instantly remembered, and felt skittery and queasy, just like you wanted.
Miss touching minds with you.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:17 pm
i miss you too, greenie. sorry i made your head and belly spin, but it’s an inherent risk, i suppose.
i am *so* glad that the memory floated to the surface, though. i love when that happens, don’t you?
08.28.2012 - 6:45 pm
A new season is coming, Candace. Reach toward it. More blue-sky days. Clear air. Nor a bad thing for any of us.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:18 pm
let’s hear it for more blue-sky days for all of us, sweet lea. it will be a new year soon, a start-over. thank you so much.
08.28.2012 - 7:07 pm
Understanding this well, and thinking why now? why at this time I have waited for; the kaleidoscope of events and things to do all the while emotions that go with them are rushing by laying wait for that still fog less night you describe so well.
Your language is always so rich and visual, would love to hear it read aloud.
Good to see you, thanks for this tonight. C.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:19 pm
i’m glad you’re here, rita. i can see your pretty face tonight, the one that your son takes after. your sentences, even in a comment, read like your poetry – do you know that?
08.28.2012 - 7:09 pm
Great Post, we’re missing you back on OS.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:21 pm
i miss the old OS, jon, more than i care to admit sometimes and a lot more than i thought i might. thanks for making the trip over here. you’ll see me in your ratings.
08.28.2012 - 7:11 pm
Of course they want to be together.
They probably missed each other.
Just us, foolish enough to want to make sense.
“If you can’t make sense,” my mother would have said, if I could have made her up, ” Make something beautiful.”
Thanks, Candace.
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:24 pm
i hate the idea that it’s foolish to want things to make sense, don’t you? as though every shred of idealism were gone, that i’d given up and accepted some terribly low standard as okay going forward. that’s probably not even what you meant, but it made me think.
i’m happy making something beautiful – or trying, anyway. and happy finding beautiful things in other people’s hard work, honest effort, from their genuine hearts. like yours.
08.28.2012 - 7:31 pm
A gifted writer writes this: The Pacific is blues from a crayon memory, a paintbox, a garden – cornflower, turquoise, a Los Gatos sky. Far out the sea is a mercury slick, the wet pelt of a silver sea lion as big as a county, barely breathing in the stunning afternoon.
I have seen this; you just made me see it again.
thanks
candace Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 9:26 pm
i can see it *again*, this time reflected in your eyes, my friend. isn’t that amazing, seriously, that it can happen? i’m so glad to see you and hope your summer idyll has been lovely. driving all over the country, only a crazy woman would do that, chasing taillights, right?
08.28.2012 - 10:31 pm
Sometimes I feel like I am floating down a gentle river, absorbed in your lyrical writing.
Other times I find myself pausing, getting lost in the rich, vivid imagery – smelling the incoming tide, gazing at the cornflower sky, swaying on the curves of the road, and that mercury slick, just *perfect*.
Your writing never fails to engage the senses – powerfully and beautifully.
I look forward to following you here
candace Reply:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:34 am
i’m very glad to see you here, DiBi, and that you liked the ride. thank you for the beautiful comment.
08.29.2012 - 10:06 am
I am with you. I have some trouble dealing with the speed of life’s Ferris Wheel as I grow older. Who in the hell turned up the speed? It is making me dizzy. The months fly by and I wonder where did the days go?
candace Reply:
August 29th, 2012 at 3:46 pm
i could have sworn i wrote that piece about this year’s july about a week ago, but when i looked at the calendar it was five times longer than that. gulp. good to see you though, blackie, even if you are half a summer older than i thought you were.
08.29.2012 - 2:39 pm
I can here Sandy Denny singing one of my favorite songs “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” as I read this a second time. All of this just sings of truth and the way things are.
Really liked this.
candace Reply:
August 29th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
and i really like *you*. thanks, rog.
08.29.2012 - 2:41 pm
OK I can also HEAR it. . . .I’d say I was nothing without an editor but I might get too quick of an agreement . . .truth is like that.
candace Reply:
August 29th, 2012 at 3:48 pm
i was going to forward your spelling error to lisa with a note: “Watch out for this guy. he’s a messy one.” but i won’t. heh.
08.29.2012 - 7:33 pm
Dammit, I can’t find the “like” button!!!
Doesn’t matter, like isn’t a big enough word for this. LOVE isn’t a big enough word.
Grok.
Yeah. I grok this. (Sci Fi fans, NOT SY FY FANS, will get that.)
It’s funny, and I know you’ll get this and others won’t but that’s ok, you write what’s in my heart. How you do that, how you know what’s in there, I’ll never figure out.
candace Reply:
September 1st, 2012 at 10:00 pm
I think it’s that a lot of us see the world in similar ways, how we feel about people, our families especially. We become friends because we see ourselves reflected in our friends’ words, in their eyes. Thank you for getting this random little collection, old friend.
09.01.2012 - 9:50 pm
What a lovely compilation of musings, Candace. Love the “fits and starts” – yes, it’s just like that.
Love you much!
candace Reply:
September 1st, 2012 at 10:01 pm
I love you too, kimmie. I’m so sorry about your son’s friend – just read your essay tonight. I’ll be thinking of you this weekend. xoxo