Clearing

A sculpture from the San Diego airport. I was here on business. I wanted to remember the movement - the way the seal seems to be swimming. I want to be able to capture that kind of movement in my dolls. I look for how the sculptor made it happen - where is the secret support. It's all in the seaweed.

I am on a slow Broadband connection and it takes forever to upload photos. And it is too tedious to move them around how I want them so I will upload them and write about them wherever they show up. Otherwise I get too bogged down and I'll never get the thought down. Tangled yarn. Some days you have the patience to untangle it, and other days you don't.

I wanted to remember this... a tidy white bathroom. Gleaming tile. Only the essentials. Toilet paper folded to a point. I wish my bathroom at home, littered with the girl's hair elastics, goo from some frizz-control product, streaks of whitening toothpaste and heaps of dirty or clean towels (they're on the floor, who knows anymore...) was the same way.

Book: Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo. (*****) Bobby Marconi (later Noonan), Lou (Lucy) Lynch, Sarah Berg (later Lou's wife), Ikey Lubin's - the corner store. Big Lou (the dad), the mother (whom I am most like). Written from Lou's point of view. An excerpt from shortly after Big Lou buys the doomed Ikey Lubin's store. He was a milkman, and he was about to lose his route:

"As she spoke, I found my anger at her leaking away It occurred to me that what she'd been doing all these weeks, probably since the moment my father had announced his purchase, was figuring out how this foolish thing that he'd done could be made to work."

Big Lou is the eternal optimist. The mother is the realist. The son belongs to the dad, in his heart of hearts. Of course the mother wishes the world was just how Big Lou imagines it to be, but she is the one who has to make it all work. And it's the mother who takes the brunt of it when the world intrudes. To remember: it is a book about choices - and that intrigued me the most. Why Sarah picked Lou, and not Bobby Marconi, and in the end, was satisfied with her choice.