Beach Music : Birthday Cake

Image via WeHeartIt

"She looked as though she had dressed for this moment with the help of the moon. Bowing deeply, Shyla asked me if she could have the pleasure of this dance.

So we danced toward the central motion of our lives. The winds roared and a strange love rose like a tide between us and rested in the crown of waves that was loosening the frame of the house. Alone we danced beneath the full moon and the battery-powered light of cars as the team and their dates cheered each time they saw a giant shift taking place in the water-damaged foundation. As the Atlantic waters rose in a sanctioned dance of wave and tide, the house began to sway like the first terrible lifting of Noah's Ark. We could hear the other five remaining couples as they screamed with pleasure and terror in that room directly beneath us. I held Shyla closely, dancing with the girl who had taught me to dance on the veranda of my house. Outside, the players and their dates were begging us to abandon the foundering house and join them at the driftwood fires. They screamed out of worry and honked their car horns out of pure admiration for our daring.

Then the house shuddered as a large wave struck against its cinder-block foundation. Though I felt that same chilling fear that had sent the others running out of the house, Shyla's eyes held me as we listened to the hammering of the waves beneath us. The cries of our friends now turned to pleas each time a wave washed down over the broken-up road, the salt spray exploding off the beaten-down tarmac that had eroded over time like a cookie half-eaten by a child.

A deck piling snapped outside, loud as a rifle shot. On the radio the Drifters began to sing "Save the Last Dance for Me. " Together, as though this scene had long been choreographed in some zodiacal prophecy, we said together and with no hesitation, "My favorite song."

- excerpted from Beach Music by Pat Conroy, 1995

Secret Garden : Newfound Nook

Julienne, San Marino

I just love a civilized little convening 'round a magical table. It certainly makes a birthday more pleasant - less focus on the aging, more focus on the conviviality! Fit for a celebratory birthday brunch, Julienne in San Marino was delicious, yes, but it was the stumbling into the unforced antiqued dining room that pushed it into hallowed space. There were high walls and mural-painted ceilings and silvered candelabras. There were shady trees under the September sunshine and outdoor conversationalists and perfectly poached yolks spilling onto freshly baked bread. And there were books - the books were the best part. Floor to ceiling shelves housed vintage leather-bounds and softly faded cloth-covereds. Voltaire, Milton, Ms. Austen, Frances Hodgson Burnett and William S.; Byron, P. Shelley, the Brontës, Wilde and Twain - all side-by-side, stacked artfully, just an arm's length from the curious diner. I felt just a little bit like Mary Lennox happening upon the secret garden for the first time. A magic in the air, an exciting discovery - like stepping into a little slice of heaven.

Mary Lennox had heard a great deal about Magic in her Ayah's stories, and she always said that what happened almost at that moment was Magic.

One of the nice little gusts of wind rushed down the walk, and it was a stronger one than the rest. It was strong enough to wave the branches of the trees, and it was more than strong enough to sway the trailing sprays of untrimmed ivy hanging from the wall. Mary had stepped close to the robin, and suddenly the gust of wind swung aside some loose ivy trails, and more suddenly still she jumped toward it and caught it in her hand. This she did because she had seen something under it - a round knob which had been covered by the leaves hanging over it. It was the knob of a door.

She put her hands under the leaves and began to pull and push them aside. Thick as the ivy hung, it nearly all was a loose and swinging curtain, though some had crept over wood and iron. Mary's heart began to thump and her hands to shake a little in her delight and excitement. The robin kept singing and twittering away and tilting his head on one side, as if he were as excited as she was. What was this under her hands which was square and made of iron and which her fingers found a hole in? It was the lock of the door which had been closed ten years, and she put her hand in her pocket, drew out the key and found it fitted the keyhole. She put the key in and turned it. It took two hands to do it, but it did turn.

And then she took a long breath and looked behind her up the long walk to see if anyone was coming. No one was coming. No one ever did come, it seemed, and she took another long breath, because she could not help it, and she held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door which opened slowly - slowly. Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight.

She was standing inside the secret garden.

- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1910

Life in Letters : Series of Escapes

Thomas Lanier Williams.

127. To Molly Day Thacher

Dear Molly Day Thacher:

I am back in St. Louis, writing furiously with seven wildcats under my skin, as I realize that completing this new play is my only apparent avenue of escape. My method of writing is terrifically wasteful. I have already written enough dialogue for two full-length plays, some of the best of which will have to be eliminated because it flies off on some inessential tangent. I wish to Christ I could write under some one's direction. That I could get back to New York. I have completed a first draft and part of a second but this process of weeding out is going to be terrific. For an intelligent writer this would not be much of a problem but I must admit I am not. My attack is purely emotional: under good direction could prove very effective but without it is in danger of spending itself in a lot of useless explosions.

However I think the play will work itself out. Because of the almost insane violence of my present attitude (loathing of St. Louis and humiliating dependence) I have to write everything over to tone it down, to eliminate the lunatic note, but eventually, perhaps in a month or two, the final product should emerge as something worth while and the author will then depart for one of three places, New York, the bone-orchard or the state sanitarium.

Of course all of this is a pathetically obvious play for sympathy. I am hoping that you will be moved to do whatever is possible to procure the fellowship for me. My whole life has been a series of escapes, physical or psychological, more miraculous than any of Houdini's but I do at the present moment seem to be hanging by that one threat: obtaining a fellowship and/or producing a successful play. Short as it was, I came away from our last interview with a good many new ideas. I still write with all my old faults but at least I am now aware of them and capable, I think, of using more self-control.

With all the suitable apologies and thanks,

Sincerely, Tenn. Williams
[42 Aberdeen Place
Clayton, Missouri]
[ca. late-October 19319]
[TLS, 1 p. HRC]

- The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 1920 - 1945

In my world, there is nothing scientific about bookstore browsing. It is an escape from the outside world, a conspiracy of the fates, willing you through this corridor and down that aisle where you inevitably find that title you never knew you needed. At bibliophilic Eden Bart's Books in Ojai, CA, that down-the-rabbit-hole excitement is particularly present as you troll for tomes beneath a 420 year-old oak. The largest independently owned outdoor bookstore in the country, Bart's is a haven for hunters, flea market finders and the generally curious. I was delighted to discover that one nook gave way to another and another until I'd found myself at the end of a most pleasant maze and stumbled upon the first volume in Mr. Williams' generous collection of personal correspondence.

His life unfolds in his letters and reveals him to be flawed, introspective, self-absorbed and undeniably brilliant - as finely drawn as one of the characters in his beloved plays. The insecurities that pecked at his artist's soul endear him to the reader. After all, if this gifted playwright doubted his prowess, certainly there's hope yet for the rest of us! With all the drama and genius of Blanche DuBois or Maggie "The Cat", his story draws you in, lulling you, Houdini-like, into a pleasant leave of absence from reality.

Tennessee Williams likely never realized that the discovery of his letters would provide a reader with the blissfully engrossed escape he himself sought all those years ago.

Peace Like an Ocean : Eyes Like the Sea

Scribner & Sons

I have never really been a beach kind of girl. Given the choice between seaside and poolside, I inevitably went for the concrete confines of domesticated aquamarine over the untamed cresting of rogue waves. Of late, however, that great wide azure expanse has meant something more appealing: peace. Peace in the beauty she graciously emits via sunshine, clouds or fog; peace in her deceptive stillness when gulped in from afar; peace in the scent of her sea spray exhalation and the gentle sweetness of her breezes; peace in the smallness she inspires in her beholders and their everyday trivialities. There is also a connection to the sea’s essence that I suspect is buried deep in the waterlogged genetic makeup of all human beings.

Though embarrassingly late to the altar of awe, I hope the frequency of my appointments to breathe in the ocean at the end of a long day convey the appropriate reverence.

Perhaps auspiciously, I happened upon an aging copy of “The Old Man and the Sea” on a recent visit to my parents’ home. I’d forgotten the force of Hemingway’s spare style and the timelessness of the old man’s plight – the magnitude of his struggle for survival rising like the crescendo of a wave on the very sea that could redeem or destroy him. His respect for the sea and its creatures is simple and finite – the reverence of his optimism culled from years of seamanship fundamental to his life's account.

The novella documents the old man’s showdown with an epic fish. Hemingway could easily have titled it “The Old Man and the Fish” or “The Old Man and the Water Beast”. But he did not. The sea was symbolic of so much more in this old man’s life – it was the only place he came alive despite his struggle to skirt his own fatality; the place he indulged in “that which he was born for.” The wholeness imparted by the paradoxical sea exists at varying levels in our lives, to be sure. But the essentialness of the paradox is never more beautiful – more poignant – that in Hemingway’s first few simply drawn graphs.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unluck, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.

It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. 

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

- The Old Man and the Sea, (1951) 

Words 'Round the Web

Wise words for a weekend via Le Love

Happy Friday! A collection of this week's loveliest from the world of words:

From Paine's Common Sense to Orwell's Why I Write, I'll be needing each title in the Penguin Great Ideas Series

One Story's pledge to save the short story comes in the form of a new writer's work delivered to my door every three weeks

I could look at new fonts for hours

Wishing I could skip the tough wedding decisions and just focus on Bird and Banner's swoon-worthy invites

No words necessary:

Words : Worth

Image via Jennifer Zwick

ses-qui-ped-al-ian |ˌseskwəpəˈdālyən|
adjective formal
(of a word) polysyllabic; long : sesquipedalian surnames.
• characterized by long words; long-winded : the sesquipedalian prose of scientific journals.

ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin sesquipedalis ‘a foot and a half long,’ from sesqui- (see SESQUI- ) + pes, ped- ‘foot.’

Every now and then, you come across a word that's certain deliciousness makes you pause with amazement at the depth and perfection of the English language. There is nearly always the ideal word for anything you need to express - it is simply a matter of finding the word and absorbing it into your lexicon. I've started carrying small scraps of paper around in my bag for just such jot-worthy finds.

This act of jotting and scrap-collecting could, I suppose, be construed as nerdy behavior. Sometimes I'll read a word and begin gushing only to be stopped mid-sentence when I look at my fiance's increasingly raised brows. It can be a lonely and misunderstood pleasure. At least it was until I met Anne Fadiman via her funny, poignant, vocab-obsessed essays in Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Suddenly, I was introduced to a whole host of jot-worthy words; it was as if the curtain had been peeled back to reveal a secret society of literature-loving, book-collecting members who couldn't consume new words and their meanings fast enough. Whenever I'm feeling particularly solitary in my idiom-centered intrigue, I revisit Ms. Fadiman's humorous tribute to her literary loves and the terms that make them so.

Here, is how I was first introduced to the tasty "sesquipedalian" and why I remember it so fondly.

"In Wally the Wordworm, a chronicle of some of our hero's lexicographic adventures that my father wrote when I was eleven, Wally savored such high-calorie morsels as syzygy, ptarmigan - which tasted terrible at first, until he threw away the p - and sesquipedalian, which looks as if it means "long word" and, in fact, does. Inspired by Wally, my brother and I spend years vying to see who could find the best sesquipedalian. He won with paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde, a smelly chemical that we use to sing to the tune of "The Irish Washerwoman." One of my greatest disappointments about growing up is that it has become harder and harder to achieve a Wally-like degree of sesquipedalian repletion."

- The Joy of Sesquipedalians from Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman

P.S. : On Searching for Blue Post Boxes

Image via Flickr

Not long ago, I read an article (I regret not recollecting where) about how those beacons of sentiments carried and errands deposited - the standard USPS blue post boxes - were disappearing en masse from the sidewalks of Los Angeles. The article regarded this exodus as tantamount to the disappearance of the honeybee - a signal of the death of correspondence and true cause for alarm. He disclosed the rationale behind the vanishing writing repositories: each must pass a serviceability test (should a box contain fewer than x articles of mail at the end of a day, away it goes) and failure of this test was surely hard evidence of our utter dereliction of cultural and linguistic duty. I remember raising my eyebrows at the author's apocalyptic pronouncements (I may have even sniffed).

And yet, when I walked the half block to my designated beacon of blue (on busy La Cienega Boulevard) and found only discolored sidewalk and discarded bolts where it once nobly stood, I couldn't have been more flustered. In the vein of the author's fervency, this was commensurate with the death of something familiar and I grieved quickly and accordingly. "But I mailed that card here a week ago!" I sputtered (denial). "This is just wrong!" (anger). "If only they'd bring it back, I'd single-handedly meet their quota each day!" (bargaining). "Wherever will I do my mailing now?" (despair) and finally "Well... there is always that post box over on Rosewood and Westbourne" (acceptance).

Except that upon further examination, that mail vessel too had been uprooted and dispatched elsewhere. Thus began my daily search for the blue post box and the subsequent commitment to sustained patronage of said keepers of the mail. Granted, more often than not, a crimson DVD-filled envelope or post-marked-at-the-last-possible-minute parking ticket is my offering, but eschewing e-transcription in any form has to help the old school delivery effort, however small. With correspondence couturiers closing up shop everywhere, one cannot be too careful when it comes to matters of the mail.

Which got me to thinking about letters. My favorite letters - namely the ones Jane Austen's heroes and heroines relied upon. In Pride and Prejudice for example, I'd argue the letter is a star character, as essential to the plot line as Mr. Darcy or Lizzy Bennet. For all my new-fangled sniffing at the handwringing over the lost art of the letter, that old Jane Austen-loving mailbox hunter within prevailed and this is why. Had disappearing postal methods descended upon Jane Austen's characters,we'd have seen the casualty of untold beloved romances. Where would modern literature be without Darcy's methodical explanation of Wickham's character, without Lydia's selfish requests for approval and cash, or Jane's eager expression of her budding love affair with Bingley? So central are these letters to the development of love and loss, worry and relief, so often are the mentions of the anxious wait for a letter upon which the state of the characters' lives depend. Further, where would we be without Ms. Austen's personal letters, erudite banter bandied about between friends and fellow authors, clarifying her works and her perception thereof? ("The greatest blunder in printing is in p. 220, v. 3, where two sentences are made into one" she said of a publishing error in the first edition.)

Somehow, the brevity of email and text communiques doesn't quite compete with the sight of loopy script on a tangible page. Somehow, the lightning fast exchanges with those you love "xoxo", "vry xcited to c u tonite" don't compare with the purity of sentiment in Mr. Darcy's entreatment for Elizabeth's understanding:

"I write without any intention of paining you, or humbling myself, by dwelling on wishes which, for the happiness of both, cannot be too soon forgotten: and the effort which the formation and the perusal of this letter must occasion, should have been spared had not my character required it to be written and read. You must therefore pardon the freedom with which I demand your attention; your feelings, I know will bestow it unwillingly, but I demand it of your justice."

- Pride & Prejudice (1813)

There are certainly all of the perks of living in a digital age (being able to "publish" a blog is clearly one of them). It seems, however, that the power of the post still oughtn't be underestimated. Maybe it should even be preserved.