Happy Hour

If ghosts ever belly up to a spirit world bar, I doubt they reminisce about the huge events of life. Sure, jackpot lottery tickets and Academy Award speeches are life's exclamation points. The winning touchdown, the heroic escape, the artful dodge -- they're loud and exciting. They break things up and flex the adrenals. But nobody wants to listen to a continuous drum solo, and too many fireworks obscure the chorus of stars. It's the day-to-day stuff that gives life it's base. We need to find our footing on solid ground in order to tilt at windmills, right?

I've been thinking a lot about the joy of ordinary things. Flowers from the Farmers Market next to a well-used teapot? Not exactly high art. But then again, if Van Gogh is up there nursing a scotch and talking about glory days, I'll bet what he remembers most are the irises, not the fact that he got famous for painting them...

Rectangles and Blue

One of the things I love most about abstract art is the way its world is rendered in shapes and colors. We get to fill in the particulars, imagine the story or transcend the figurative. I remember once standing in front of a Rothko painting with Shanna.

"I don't get it," I said. "It's a black canvas."

"Yes," she said. "But actually look at the paint on the canvas."

I stepped closer, and suddenly I was looking into a painting instead of at a picture.

I know this is just a photograph of a gas pump. But somewhere in my hamfisted grasp at modern composition, somewhere in my attempt at deconstructing the world into rectangles and blue is a nod to Rothko's revolutionary painting technique. It is in the spirit of what Walt Whitman wrote here:

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the
same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass--the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women,
and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.

Familiar Places

My family spent yesterday just chilling out: a morning walk around the neighborhood, a lazy afternoon playing at Eddie Park and this sunset view from the benches above the skate park.

I had to smile when I heard this song coming from a neighbor's window...

Year End Oracle

It's the last day of the year, and that means more than just icing the champagne and tuning in to watch the Times Square ball drop...

It means there is still time to make a 2009 tax-deductible contribution to a worthy cause! Two of my favorite charities really need help:

Kiva
This group has made microfinance not only cool but socially conscious. Kiva connects people through lending for the sole purpose of alleviating poverty. Voted as a best website of 2008 by Time magazine, Kiva allows you to lend money to a low-income entrepreneur in the developing world. The loan recipient repays the money, and you get to lend it to someone else. We're not talking huge bucks, either ... you can loan as little as $25. Want to know more? Take a look at what the media is has to say about Kiva.

Donors Choose
Here's a great way to make up for all the times you cut class in high school. By giving to Donors Choose, you can help needy students get the materials public schools often cannot provide. Teachers from around the country submit project proposals -- everything from requests for classroom equipment to art supplies -- and you pick which projects to fund. You can search by areas of interest, financial need or geographic location. When you get the packet of handwritten thank you notes from an appreciative class, you'll feel like you've really made a difference in the world. Learn more about Donors Choose here.

Like the car above says, be heartful! Or maybe it says be love-ful? Oh, you get the idea.

Leave the Light On

This wonderful old light fixture hangs at the top of my stairs. I can see it through the window when I pull into the driveway after dark. It's a friendly little beacon. It's quirky and dependable -- kind of like the family it welcomes home. I love the rosy glow of that light, especially after a long day.

Like yesterday, for example...

You've heard me say that things are just different in South Pasadena. That it's kinder here. That in the cruel, impersonal jungle of Los Angeles, South Pas is an oasis of cornball, old-school neighborliness that borders on fetishistic. (And we like it that way.) It's not that the rest of LA is mean -- it's just that so much of South Pas is nice. Really nice. It's kind of weird how nice it is here. People smile and hold doors open here. They throw block parties. They bring you homemade marshmallows and fudge during the holidays. Oh, I'm sure there are some rude, angry, self-centered people in South Pas -- I just haven't run across them yet. (No doubt they skip the old-fashioned Fourth of July Parade.)

But, we can't always stay within the borders of our happy, little village. Yesterday, my daughter and I were waiting to pay for a laptop charger at the Best Buy in Hastings Ranch when a tall man in an expensive suit cut in front of us.

"Hey," I said, "The line is back there."

"Whatever," he said, and then ambled over to the check stand to buy his Transformers DVD.

So, the guy was a first-class toad but not worth getting riled up over. I explained to my daughter that sometimes grownups forget their manners. Next, we drove to a fabric store in Alhambra. At this point, my daughter realized that she needed a bathroom.

"Can you tell me where to find the bathroom?" I asked one of the cashiers.

He looked at me, sighed and said, "Um, no. We don't have a bathroom."

"I have to pee!" My daughter started to freak out, "I think it's going to come out NOW!"

"You don't have a bathroom?" I said.

He stared at me. "No."

I blinked. He didn't.

"Can you let me know which store in this shopping center has a bathroom?"

"I'm pretty sure none of them do," he said. Then, like something remembered from a training manual he added, "Sorry."

I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that I know for a fact he was not sorry.

"Hurry, Mommy!" Now my kid was crying, "HURRY!!!"

"I don't know what to tell you," he said, and then went back to straightening and unstraightening shopping bags, right next to a sign that insisted sewing holiday decorations brought back old fashioned family values.

I'm not sure how we managed it but we got home without soiling clothes or car seat -- no accidents, just a lot of tears and a few broken speed limits. Later, I realized I was out of Tylenol. I drove to the South Pasadena Rite Aid on Fair Oaks.

"I'm just curious," I said to the woman stocking paper towels. "Do you have a bathroom I could use?"

"Oh sure," she said with a glow every bit as warm as my lamp in the window. "Let me get the keys."

It's good to be home.

Paying Attention...

I pass this fire hydrant a lot. It's on the sidewalk near Orange Grove Park. You might just walk right by and never notice the Tiffany box blue top, flecked with rust and age (and stories, no doubt, because all old things have stories) and even if you noticed, you might not really look at it because, after all, who stops to look at fire hydrants?

Well, I guess I do.

And I'm glad, too, because isn't it grand? It's nice to come across a perfect rose or a spectacular sunset. Sure, those beautiful things delight ... but they don't necessarily surprise. I think it's much more cool when something ordinary sneaks up on you with a loveliness you never expected.

Small Wonders

Pulitzer prizewinner and former poet laureate Ted Kooser once wrote these lines:

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange,
you need never leave home.

He spoke about these words before an overflowing crowd at the Library of Congress a few years ago. "This four-line poem is a kind of credo for me," he said. "In short, we have beauty all about us, if we take the time to pay attention to it. Reinhold Marxhausen knew about paying attention; George Ault knew it. Pablo Neruda wrote dozens of remarkable poems about common things. Thousands of poets and painters have learned to pay attention like this. We honor the ordinary by giving it our attention. We enshrine the ordinary in our art. Is there anything really ordinary, I wonder?"

I've been thinking a lot about paying attention to the beauty of commonplace things. It's easy to blissfully sigh at a gorgeous bit of architecture or a breathtaking view. But it takes a little more than casual observation to notice everyday loveliness --the sweet shadow and texture of something mundane.

Like a trash dumpster surrounded on three sides by concrete walls.

Maybe I'm crazy -- but there, in a wash of afternoon light, I think it's just beautiful.