A BLOG IN TRANSITION

I was away for almost a month. I decided that upon returning I would make some blog changes. Complete overhaul, from appearance to content. However, this kind of action takes time and when you come back after a month’s absence the stack of things requiring immediate attention is unreal. So I am giving myself a deadline: June 1st. By June 1st this particular blog renovation will be complete. That gives me two weeks to do nothing about it and one day at the end to madly put in changes.

EYE MOVEMENT

In the meantime I am still mulling over a comment I heard yesterday on the Van Galder bus from O’Hare. The driver, an extremely outgoing and friendly guy, tells a passenger that she might want to turn on her overhead light to avoid eye strain. It is dusk and she is reading away, inching closer and closer to the window, trying to catch that fading light. “No thank you,” she says. “I prefer to read in natural light.”

Is it a new movement? A self-at-one-with-the-world type of thing? She’s riding the bus from the airport, so two strikes there against thinking that she is technology-averse.

The eyes are peculiar kind of body part: apart from eating lots of carrots when told to do so by 1950s parents who said “Eat carrots or you’ll go blind!” we don’t do much preventively for them. We just patch up the problems as they arise (except for my purist nephew, the Krishna one, who believes that his prescription glasses are a sign of spiritual weakness and so he does eye exercises to improve his vision and get rid of the glasses; jury’s still out on whether there’s progress – he CLAIMS there is, but sometimes his spiritual self preordains a desired result even if science cannot prove it).

Is she onto something? I gave in to 5 minutes of googling on the topic, but ‘light and reading’ led me in all sorts of directions where I didn’t want to go (for instance on ‘seeing the light,’ or on very very ‘unserious’ reading).

[btw, I don’t know about eye-care, but I have decided that sleep is way over-rated and so I continue to view it with scorn and avoid it at all possible times.]

SONGS THAT HAUNT

On my very last flight I watched nothing on the nifty little TV monitor by my seat (and, I have to brag that I never once turned on a TV in any of my hotel rooms for the duration of my month away). This was NOT a naturalist thing. It was because I got addicted to the “musique francaise” channel on the audio program and so I listened to that over and over and over again (it was a 9-hour flight). Consequently, one of the songs is wedged in my brain and I WANT IT HERE AND NOW! If I wrote to Air France, would they understand this kind of inquiry: “Dear Madame or Monsieur, On your French Music Program, the one you’ve been running in April and May, there is a female vocalist and a male vocalist. I know the male one – Charles Aznavour. I don’t remember the name of the female. She sings this very pretty in an odd sort of way song that stays in the low range and then jumps into the higher ranges and I have a desperate desire for that little song now! Could you look it up in your files and send me the title? Thank you very much, Your loyal patron – the one who selected YOU as the airline of choice for a flight from Chicago to Tokyo, NC”

GARDENS THAT TURN INTO JUNGLES

My mind is still on the gardens of Japan and Giverny. Inspired, I come home with new resolve to rework and improve my perennial beds. This little sign noted in a Paris café is dancing in my head, and I cannot wait to get to my own little Giverny outside.



But inspiration is a short-lived thing. Especially when you wake up in the morning, go out to take stock, and witness this, which some may call a grassy stretch and others, the more realistically-inclined, may view as an intrepid assault of the weeds:



And how about this mess, where all spring blooms are spent and not a single summer perennial has yet to show signs of budding. My God, what was I thinking? Did I forget to plant for May??