Caption this photo... (#11)

I'm drawing a blank on this one. Anyone?

Overcast

Think the greater Los Angeles area is always sunny? Not this time of year. Welcome to what locals call "June Gloom" -- a few weeks of drearily grey weather worthy of a moody refrain by a Seattle grunge band.

It will all boil off soon in the approaching summer heat but for now... sigh. (At least the jacarandas are blooming!)

Purple Prose...

It's June now, and that means the jacaranda trees have started showing off. Jacarandas are the big, flashy divas of early summer. It's hard to adequately describe a jacaranda to someone who has never experienced the tree's particular flourish, but I'll try...

Imagine if you hosted an afternoon tea party in June: your guests would trickle in wearing cheerful warm weather clothes -- some chinos, a few floral sundresses in delicate spring colors. Then, perhaps a little late, that woman would show up. You know. The loud one in the full-length purple organza ball gown.

That's a jacaranda tree.

These scene-stealers have only just begun to bloom. You can find them in little pockets all over Los Angeles -- with great swaths of them along Marengo here in South Pas and lining Del Mar in Pasadena. In a few weeks, they'll have dropped all petals in messy swirls of violet rain. (You know how divas are. Always with the drama!)

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.

No great feat ... just great feet

It's the first of the month -- and that means Theme Day for participating City Daily Photo bloggers. Today's theme? Feet!

Yes, feet. (Foot fetishists of the world, rejoice! Today you have a veritable treasure trove over at the CDP website...)

Regular readers of GOSP will recognize this whimsical tilt-a-whirl from a recent post about the South Pasadena Fun Fair. I couldn't resist posting another shot for today's theme. There is something so tender and hopeful and human about feet. These dangling sneakered tootsies make me smile. I think poet Sharon Creech gets to the point here:

Footfalls

Thump-thump, thump-thump
bare feet hitting the grass
as I run run run
in the air and like the air
weaving through the trees
skimming over the ground

touching down
thump-thump, thump-thump
here and there
there and here
in the soft damp grass

thump-thump, thump-thump
knowing I could fly fly fly
but letting my feet
thump-thump, thump-thump

touch the earth

at least for now. . .


Be sure to take a look at the many creative Theme Day images by other photobloggers around the world. Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

Girls of Summer

Crack! Such a hopeful sound bounced off the afternoon quiet. Almost simultaneously there was an expectant swell of cheers and a few happy cries of wooooohooooo! And then, as she raced around third base, a chorus of "Run, Lily, Run! Run, Lily, Run! Run, Lily, Run!"

And Lily ran. (All the way home.)

Black Tie

A little blurry, perhaps. But then again, isn't that the way we all remember prom night?

Incongruous

I know littering is a problem in the Arroyo ... but throwing in an entire trash can?

Apartments in Blue

It's easy to get caught up in the beauty of the city's historic homes, but tucked among them are a number of charming apartment buildings, many built in the 1950s and 60s. As of 2007, about 56% of South Pas residents were renters. (Who knows how much this number may have risen due to the housing crisis.) While I am grateful to own my home, and I appreciate the fact that I can put down deep roots, there is something to be said for the nomadic joy of being the rest of a lease and a U-haul away from packing up and moving.

Remember your first apartment? For me, it was a chalet-style 8-plex near my university campus. The metal stairs rattled and the front rooms barely got any light but in my mind it was my own little niche in the universe -- complete with a futon, a Klimt poster and a burgeoning wooden bookcase. When I moved to Los Angeles a few years later, I rented a fabulous old 1920s walk-up in Hollywood a few doors down from Chaplin's first studio and a block away from the strip club Motley Crue made famous in Girls Girls Girls.

While houses allow a certain my-home-is-my-castle distance, apartments insist on a sense of community. Shared walls, shared laundry rooms, shared conversations at complex pool parties. Just think, without apartments, there would have been no Tales of the City. And who knows what tales could be told about this little city? While I was taking the picture above, I heard a snippet of a conversation coming from somewhere nearby:

"I think I might really love him," she said, "but there's that thing with the dog..."

(I guess I could have kept listening, but nobody wants to be a nosy neighbor.)

Art Director...

The idea: a gritty monochrome study of this corner of the South Pasadena Post Office -- an image to symbolize our crowded yet compartmentalized lives in the modern age.

Yeah, well, my little girl had other ideas: "I'm going to race to the end of that sad room and start dancing."

I like her concept much better.

People always say to me
"What do you think you'd like to be
When you grow up?"
And I say "Why,
I think I'd like to be the sky
Or be a plane or train or mouse
Or maybe a haunted house
Or something furry, rough and wild ...
Or maybe I will stay a child."

--Karla Kuskin

Night Owls

I couldn't resist taking a picture of this house. It lit up an otherwise dark street like a big night light.

Memorial Day

When I was a freshman in high school back in Austin, Texas, I fell madly in love with the boy who sat behind me in my English class. His name was Tim. He had dark brown hair that fell across his forehead and dark blue eyes that sparkled every time I turned around to tell him to stop kicking my chair. He wore a beat-up, 40s-era bomber jacket and could make archaic slang words like "swell" sound effortlessly new. If someone insulted him -- you know, with one of those classic high school put-downs that usually involved unspeakable acts with farm animals or insinuations about inbreeding -- Tim would pause, slowly nod his head, smile and say, "oh yeah?" He was ridiculously handsome, even at 15, and managed to carry it off with a goodhearted sheepishness that made teachers look the other way when he ambled into class late -- and convinced me (to the depths of my very soul!) that he was the most exceptional creature on planet earth and if I lived to be a hundred I'd never be able to express the extent of my feelings for him.

Instead, I played it cool. We talked about Shakespeare and The Clash when we bumped into each other at our lockers. I tried not to stutter when we split a beer together at a party -- the one where he confessed that he believed in fate and that was why he didn't worry about things. I told him that I thought fate needed a good kick in the ass most of the time. He laughed and said it was more fun to go with the flow than to fight.

In fact, the only time I ever saw Tim get into a fight was when one of the football players picked on a nerdy drama kid at an outdoor concert in the park. I wish I could say Tim pummelled the bully in a scene worthy of Clint Eastwood. It wasn't quite like that. But after an inelegant scuffle of a few thudding punches, Tim walked away with the grace of a triumphant samurai.

Tim and I never became real sweethearts, but we remained good friends throughout high school. Whenever my boyfriend broke my heart, Tim let me cry on his shoulder and flirted with me just enough to make my boyfriend jealous. At graduation, Tim was the first person I hugged. Tim was also the last person I ever expected to tell me he was joining the Marines.

"I'll see the world and do some good," he said. And then he laughed and said, "Or knowing me, maybe I'll just get in all kinds of trouble."

He was killed the following year in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. He was 19.

It's Memorial Day here in the United States. A time for most people to sleep late and linger over coffee before applying sunscreen, stocking the cooler and tossing the steaks on the grill. Those are all good things. In fact, they're the kind of good things that most of the members of our armed forces think about when they're stationed around the planet seeing the world, doing some good and, too often, getting in all kinds of trouble.

Lets take a moment to remember the ones who never made it home.


In remembrance of Timothy McMahon, 1964-1983