Yes, We’re still practicing the skateboard and ball.

Why must we we work so tirelessly at these difficult and dangerous tricks? Because we know that some day, some glorioius day in the not too distant future, we will be asked to appear on this show:

I usually love to blog when we go away, but I didn’t take my laptop with us to Bermuda, so I’ll provide a tidy summary now.

First, Bermuda is very close to New York. We arrived in Bermuda in less time than it would have taken us to drive to Cape Cod, so you would think that Denis and I might have ventured there at some point in the last couple of decades, but we haven’t. Denis had never been to Bermuda before this trip. I went to Bermuda once, when I was in ninth grade. It was my first trip outside the United States and so I have always thought that my memories of the island’s beauty and tropical splendor were probably wildly inflated as they can be, by the limited perspective of my youth. I remembered walking off the plane and being dazzled by the warm salty air and the blue sky and the turquoise sea that had appeared, from the sky, to lap at the runways of the little airport. I went there with a very fun friend whose family used to live in Bermuda and we ran around with all her old friends to little island discos at night and were served pina coladas and all sorts of other frozen rum drinks because the drinking age there at that time was apparently 13.

Anyway, I sort of thought that returning to Bermuda would be like what happened when I reread Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as an adult. The first time I read The Fountainhead I, a) fell in love with Howard Roark, b) determined to become a writer and c) developed a lifelong crush on all men working at construction sites. I was in the tenth grade at the time and, well, I just thought Dominique and Roark were insanely cool and sexy with their radical idea that brilliant men should be allowed to rape beautiful women and build skyscrapers however they damned well pleased. I felt that Dominique and Roark and I were kindred spirits. I hated traditionalism with them. I denounced pretentious building facades with them. I pretended that Roark was raping Dominique with them – knowing all along that she wanted him to give her the comeuppance she so richly deserved. When I read it again, as an adult, I have to say I was a little embarrassed for my younger self. I used to rave about this book. It was one of those books that I carried around with me, along with volumes of collected poems by Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath so that people would understand that I was a  young troubled genius. Just like those authors had once been. A young troubled genius who doodled pictures of ponies and puppies in the margins of the pages.

So I suspected that I’d go back to Bermuda with my jaded, somewhat wiser and more-travelled adult perspective and wonder at how I had been so enchanted by the island. But in fact, the island is enchanting, I had been right. It wasn’t like rereading The Fountainhead at all. Bermuda is beautiful. The houses are beautiful, the trees and gardens are beautiful, the people are beautiful and the beaches are unbelievably beautiful.

You can’t rent cars in Bermuda. All tourists must either ride in cabs or drive mopeds, which is what we did. The first day, on the way to the moped place, I said to Denis, “Let’s not get two, let’s get a double. We can pretend we’re in the movie The Deep. You be Nick Nolte and I’ll be Jacqueline Bissett. Only I’ll wear a bra.” Later, I said, “Actually, let’s pretend we’re in Easy Rider. You can be Peter Fonda and I’ll be Jack Nicholson.” When we saw the tiny scooter that we would be sharing I said, “Let’s pretend we’re riding on something that grown-ups would ride. Something that doesn’t look like it was taken off a merry-go-round.”

Meg, her husband Mark, Denis and I swam, ate, payed tennis, scooted about the island and on our last night there, some old family friends who are Bermudian, took us out on a sunset cruise on their boat, which was beautiful.

Though I have been having problems loading photos from my regular camera onto blog, I am able to load iPhone photos.  I really love the quality of the iPhone photos so it might just be the official camera of the Ann Leary blog from now on.

Can we have a contest to come up with a name for this blog once and for all?  Winner will get both of my books and Denis’s book signed.  I don’t usually offer D’s book but I’m desperate here.

In the meantime, here are some photos I recently took.

First, gardeners, biologists, specialists in extra-terrestial activity, would you perhaps be able to tell me what this stuff is?

I was visiting a neighbor when I was shown this.  Our thoughts were bear vomit, alien spawn/ spore or toxic waste bubbling up from the earth’s core.

To add to the horror of it all, ghost girl showed up. How odd that this time a ghost man is with her and he appears to be holding a gun to her head.  Maybe this explains how our girl came to be a ghost in the first place:

Here are some flowers. I know. I’m no Moses Pendleton:

I have to remember to turn the iPhone so that all the photos aren’t vertical.  Will blog later about EMT training.  This is what I’ve taken away from it thus far:  Be careful!  This week I learned how to pack dressing around an impaled object and how to bandage an eye that is coming out of somebody’s head.  I advise all of you to wear  protective body padding and a helmet with face mask. It really should be a law. Not all the time, of course. Just when you’re out of bed.

Okay, I am seriously about to throw this laptop out my window. I can no longer load photos that I take with my camera because the software I lost when my hard drive died, is gone. It’ll never come back.  In its place is a new version of the same software and it just doesn’t work. I just can’t get the stupid thing to work.

Oh the photos you could be seeing!  Remember when this blog was a glorious place, alive with color?  Remember the perfect simplicity of a sun-dappled leaf?  The amber sunsets? The porcelain snowscapes? Tim?

Sigh.

But let’s not let is spoil our day.  We still have our words.

Today I was reading an article about Islamic culture. It was about the controversial tradition of women concealing their features by wearing burqas.  I began the article feeling sympathy –  no I’ll go so far as to actually say I felt pity for the burqa wearers, living a life, as they do, of veiled obsolescence.  Then I read the rationale that one Islamic woman gave for the custom. “It is so that we will not bring shame to our families,” she explained.

It’s to spare the family shame.

What an ingenious garment!  Oh, how my daughter wishes I had one when I decided to show off my French during a class on Parent’s Day at her school. And the time I walked right into a shot on a film set where my husband was working, causing the exhausted crew to have to set the whole shot up again and several cast members to curse me aloud.  If I had been wearing a burqa, nobody would know whose mother or wife I was.  These Burqa wearers are not suppressed, they are not deprived of rights. Why they’re as free as birds!  Imagine!  Too tired to shave your legs or wash your hair?  There’s no need.  Feel the urge to bust out your best moves at son’s graduation party?  Why not have yourself a good old-fashioned drunken bender culminating in a prolonged urine-soaked nap on the stoop of your building? Go ahead!  Nobody will know it’s you.

No need to worry about sun-damaged skin.  Underneath that black sack, your skin will be as soft as a baby’s bottom. And even if it’s not, even if its covered with hideous sores and oozing pus, nobody but your bossy husband will be able to see it.  And of course you could lie to everybody about your looks and your age. You could claim that you look EXACTLY like Penelope Cruz, that you’re 23, that your breasts are huge, your thighs slender, your nose just as cute as a button.

So that’s what I’m doing today.  Appreciating a beautiful ancient foreign custom. What are you guys up to?

It’s cold and grey here in Connecticut today, which makes it a perfect movie day. Two hours ago, I tuned in, as I always do on rainy Sundays, to TCM and was delighted to find a movie that I have never seen before.  It was Light in the Piazza, starring Olivia de Havilland.

Light in the Piazza gets its name from ….nothing.  There is nothing in the film that makes any sense of the title, except that it contains the word, piazza, which hints that it might take place in Italy. Well, in fact it does take place in Italy.  It’s the story of a wealthy, middle-aged American woman (de Havilland) who takes her beautiful blonde American daughter, Clara, to Florence for a holiday.  There, a wealthy young Italian man, Fabrizio, falls in love with Clara. The problem is that, though Clara looks like a 20-something bombshell, in fact, she was kicked in the head by a pony when she was little, and now has the mental capacity of a 10-year-old.  So she flits about, giggling and chasing puppies and splashing in her bath and in swimming pools, completely happy in her innocence.  Her mother and father’s marriage is unravelling because the father wants to place Clara in a home for the mentally retarded.  But, in Florence, the mother’s dreams are realized.  Clara will not need to go to a home at all because Fabrizio and all his family and friends see nothing wrong with Clara at all.  You see, to them, Clara is a typical American girl – beautiful, rich, silly and …well,  dumb as a rock.  How did I never see this movie before?  It’s written as a heartwarming drama, but has such a comic premise and the lines!  Hilarious! George Hamilton plays the Italian lover!  The sets, the driving sequences with ridiculous footage of Italian scenery flying by.  Oh, the campy, corny lines!  And just as the credits started to roll, I learned that I should get my lunch of ice cream and brownie soup right quick, because up next: Sunset Boulevard.  Later?  To Sir With Love.

On the seventh day, God created TCM.

We’re off to the airport this morning after our lovely week in the Bahamas. The best thing about a family vacation when your kids are older is the opportunity to have every meal with them.  We rarely eat together when they are home,  but we always dine together when we travel.

This morning, as we had our last breakfast on a terrace overlooking the sea, we remarked on the other people who were dining – many of whom we had given special nicknames.  We’re  inveterate people watchers (and mockers) we four, and had been reporting back to each other every day on the antics of Rude Guy, who had ambushed the manager with a torrent of abuse within minutes of arriving here, coincidentally, at the same time that we arrived. So appalled were we by his behavior that we all went out of our way to prove to the staff that we had no connection to him and his frowning wife.  There was much rolling of eyes and glaring from our camp and ridiculous overtipping out of some sort of guilt by association.  We had arrived on this quiet, idyllic island on the same plane as these griping sourpusses and we felt that we owed the island some sort of compensation. Then there was dear, dear Doting Dad, who spent an entire week walking around cuddling and nuzzling his baby daughter, who couldn’t have been more than three months old.  The handsome, middle-aged man and his daughter could be found rocking under a shady tree by the pool,  or strolling along the pathways (she held in the crook of his arm with her plump cheek pressed to his) or under an umbrella in the sand – she kicking her feet in the air, he smiling at her, helplessly in love. When he carried her into the restaurant one evening, the two of them were dressed in crisp colorful, matching resort wear – hers with ballooning diaper-concealing pantaloons.  I told the kids, excitedly,  that I thought he was a single dad who had decided to adopt the baby or have her by surrogate, but the kids told me they’d seen the mom reading by the pool each day, alone.  She became Lazy Mom to us.  Of course there was wise Leo, the Tennis Whisperer and hunky Calvin, his son.  And on the beach, each day, a procession of strangers paraded past.  Young honeymooners, old marrieds, pairs of women -deep in conversation, athletes running in the sand, swimmers, dealers in jewelry (or worse), laughing children and tired parents – all revealing truths that have been lost to us these cold months up north – hard and beautiful truths about youth and age.   The beach walkers moved along the water’s edge like a patient migrating herd, their heads bent slightly into the wind, their bosoms, bellies, scars, tattoos, pregnancies, cellulite, hair, muscles, wrinkles and veins all unabashedly exposed, like imperfect but delightful  offerings to the merciless sun and to anybody else who cared to look.

Today, as I drove around our charming little town in search of a USB cord (didn’t find one, but if you’re looking for candles I can show you ten shops within spitting distance of each other) I realized that I need no such cord, as I have several Moses Pendleton photos that I’ve not yet posted. Quite a few actually. There are are a series of red roses that I absolutely refuse to post here because they are rich and sensual and textured and beautiful, and the photos really do lose something when I reformat them for the blog. I just can’t do it, but hope to get prints of them from him someday. I know exactly where I will hang them, Moses, if you ever figure out how to print them.

But I recalled a photo that Moses sent me over a month ago that I just love.  Here it is:

Photo by Moses Pendleton

I love the way the two chairs seem to be just barely touching hands, facing into the late afternoon sun together. Rooted there, like a lovely old married couple.

Then, wonder of wonders, I found a place that sells …well I have no idea what the hell it’s called but you take the photo card from the camera and stick it in this little plastic thing and then you insert the erect male end of the little plastic thing into one of the female receptors on your computer and, if the camera and the plastic thing really love each other, boys and girls, they will make pictures together!

I know somebody here tried to explain this contraption to me once. Maybe somebody knows what it’s called.

So now I’ll post some photos I took during our last snow storm.  I hate to post my photos on the same page as Moses’s, but mine is a sort of photo essay. It’s the story, more than the composition that’s important.

This is Holly in the snow.  The snow makes Holly feel quite alive and full of herself.

She believes that the cold gives her special powers that will enable her to conquer all larger mammals.  Here is Daphne after Holly has gone for a muzzle-grab:

Oops. She tried the same move on Lulu and was forced to offer an immediate surrender:

Here they are having a little conversation, working out the terms of the surrender. Somebody looks slightly humbled:

But all is soon forgotten. Holly will walk behind the other dogs for a little while. Until her special powers return:

Horses in snow:

A field of white:

Just this today. No poem. The photo is unaltered. The sky was that.

I was in the city today and had plans to meet a friend for lunch.  I noticed that the stores on Fifth Avenue already have their holiday decorations up.  Seemed odd on such a mild day.  But beautiful.

I drove past this little park on East 51st street that I had never seen before:

After I parked, I walked past it and saw people enjoying themselves in the area.  I don’t know if you can see it in the photo, but there’s a lovely waterfall in the back.  There was a big sign explaining that it was a “private space open to the public” and there was a long list of things you could and could not do.  You could eat this, but not that, drink this, not that, etc. Well, with the beautiful trees and the waterfall, I decided it was the nicest private space open to the public I have ever seen, so I took a few photos and was careful to eat and drink nothing.

After lunch I brought my friend back to look at the space.  All the people had gone, but I noticed a sign that I hadn’t see when I took the other pictures.

Still can’t read it?  It said this:

Okay, Private Space Open To The Public, get over yourself!  I mean you’re beautiful and everything, but no photos?  You’re too important to be photographed?

I now am going to make it my mission to mark the seasons by the changes in the Private Space Open To The Public. I am now officially its paparazzi stalker.

Photo by Moses Pendleton

Yes, time for a fresh dose of Moses. I’m not sure if I’ve shared this here, but Moses has tens of thousands of photographs of his sunflowers. He also has thousands of hours of video footage of them. You wouldn’t think that something as static and motionless as a row of plants would make for interesting video footage. I’ll just say that his sunflowers don’t stand still when Moses is in their midst. You wouldn’t believe the energy in those fields when he is there.

I think this photo is my favorite sunflower photo so far. No, okay, this is my favorite, but the one above ranks a close second. That’s actually Cynthia Quinn, Moses’ partner and collaborator on the left. She’s so petite, and the sunflower so large, that at first I thought that perhaps Moses had dressed up another sunflower as the grim reaper. The photo doesn’t do the beautiful Cynthia justice. This is what she really looks like:


I lifted the Cynthia photos from the web and couldn’t find the name of a photographer to credit. Sorry, amazing photographer.

Anyway, here’s a spooky poem to go with the spooky photo. I really love October in New England.

Spellbound
by Emily Brontë
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.