Today my beautiful lady has been filled with what I believe are gerbera daisies. Cost for flowers, about $20 @ Trader Joe’s.
I had gerberas in my wedding bouquet by necessity and not choice. Unfortunately my April wedding came to be about two weeks after the ranunculus were spent and gone. I wanted ranunculus, because they have a wind-blown look. I wanted orange, and my sister had an orange dress. We both had our dresses made by Kevin Simon, who seems to have vaporized since she once had a very pricey store on Abbott Kinney Boulevard. Kevin made everything in linen, and she was a master of sort of vintage-farm looking clothing, like late 1800s. I loved her work and could not afford any of it, so I splurged on my dress and my sister’s, assuming I was only getting married once. A regular skirt at Kevin’s was over $500. My wedding dress and my sister’s MOH dress combined were $1000. The back bottom of my dress had tulle orange flowers pinned to it. My dress was linen with a silk slip, and my sister’s was orange silk. I’ve since lost about 70 pounds, and I left the dress at Goodwill in Delaware when I moved, but I kept all the organza flowers.
In any case, I do have to say I’m not usually a gerbera girl, except when needs must. But today the yellow (which is a lot lighter in real life) on the flowers screamed, “Butter!” at me, with just a hint of orange at their centers, and so I was compelled. Mixed them with orange and some green greenery, et voila!
The little pumpkin/squash you see there I plan to eat, not carve. LOL. Roasted pumpkin in things is divine! As are these lovely gerbera. Ranunculus are actually not great cut flowers, so droopy.
It is a blessing to have flowers anywhere in the world, of any kind, and especially on my very sunny kitchen counter. Buy the flowers, hold them high, and repeat after me, “Here’s to the times we bless others, and also to the times we bless ourselves!”
Have a wonderful week~
PS. Most flowers I buy last a full two weeks! Just keep the water clean and fresh.
Today my beautiful lady head is holding pincushion protea, safflower, and eucalyptus. When I was younger I was more snooty about flowers: they had to smell, and smell good. None of these really have a smell, although fresh (really fresh) eucalyptus can smell wonderful. Cost for flowers, again about $11 at Trader Joe’s.
I venture to say I’ve almost made it through summer, always a challenge for me as a person who prefers chillier climes. My sister reports that up (up the hill) in Idyllwild where she lives now it has been chilly and stormy… of which I am envious as we’ve had a 90-100 degree heat wave here. It’s been a bit of a year so far, her dealing with a diagnosis of mucosal melanoma, and me dealing with her diagnosis. We’ve done the majority of her doctor’s appointments together, and although I know she sometimes must get sick of me, I really have treasured spending all that time with my baby sis. She was supposed to go visit our handful of a mother, but there were new protocols to try, so that got cancelled. She’s hoping our mother will come to her. I am not holding my breath on that because the mountain usually doesn’t go to Mohammed.
I now present an actual undoctored video of Mama:
Ha!
No, that’s not actually her, but the “everything” about Lucille is pretty close to Mama Pearce. And… if I tease out the comparison… I’m probably Michael in that scenario, who is probably the lamest Bluth. Sorry Michael. I have to tell the truth… on both of us!
As long as I have been a parent I have been worried about my daughter’s summer plans/schedule, because she’s a kid who does better with one than without. She was too old for any camps this year, so we just made a deal: she took an online Driver’s Ed course; she had to make plans with one friend at least once a week, and she did some new and interesting chores around the house in preparation for someday being in charge of her own dorm room or apartment. She mopped, and organized, and did all sorts of things she doesn’t have a lot of time for when school is in session, because her program has days that run from 8-5, but can go as late as 9. She’s joined a teen program at Pasadena Playhouse for the fall, where she’ll begin to get a little real-world backstage experience. And she passed the driver’s ed course. We’re waiting for the necessary pink slip to arrive in the mail, which will allow her to take the permit test (it is a rule in California that they have the pink slip before they take the permit test.).
Anyway, it’s been a busy few months, and I’m glad school has begin again, and the patterns are falling back into place that alleviate some of the the pressure. Is there a mom out there in a hetero relationship whose partner takes on the responsibility for the kid(s) over the summer?
🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗
Are those… crickets?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
When life comes in waves of responsibility and busyness, you STILL have to manage to get to the ever more expensive grocery store (wait, I thought he was lowering the prices on day 1…. Good thing none of us held our breath), so skip a few of the overpriced boxes of cereal, or other overpriced things, and make sure you use ten bucks or so to buy yourself flowers!
These flowers I love because… orange, and green, the two best colors ever.
From the time I can remember, whenever I belonged to any group, I was, what my brother would call, a rah! rah!
My brother was definitely not a rah! rah! But, in his defense, organized things, like church and school, weren’t always that welcoming to the distracted kid who looked like he would have preferred to be anywhere other than there, and he would have.
I remember so clearly many aspects of 1976. I wore one of those mop hats Betsy Ross and the like wore, because my class was so often engaged in colonial reenactments at malls and nursing homes. I remember my friend, Krissi, who had Mr. Griffin instead of Mrs. Wentz, and her whole class did a huge lip-syncing performance, and Krissi got to be Elton John while another girl, who I was very jealous of, got to be Kiki Dee. Damn!
But my class was relegated to what Mrs. Wentz liked, and that was patriotism.
Well, that wasn’t that hard for me. I loved fireworks, something which, I must admit, years of dog ownership as an adult have soured for me. I loved barbecues in the back field with all the dads playing softball against all the sons, even if it did mean that the other daughters and I were stuck being beer-bringers, cheerleaders, and trash-picker-uppers. I was so proud a few years earlier for the Battle of the Sexes, where Billie Jean King roundly kicked Bobby Riggs’ old ass. I believed in feminism from the door, as much as a new human could. But the guys were not at all happy about Billie Jean King. They were pissed, and embarrassed, as if each one of them was Bobby Riggs. When our working class neighborhood had those ball games in the field I had an understanding that the guys needed those ball games. Those dads needed to clobber their young sons, and they needed their wives and daughters to cheer them on.
I have the photo of Converse at the top because we wore Converse and Keds, my brother and me, and I had a pair of Converse, I think they were Converse, in 1976 that were stars and stripes, and I loved them. I had a patriotic T, and I put crepe paper in my spokes, and biked in the 4th of July parade, learned all the patriotic songs (I was able to sing all the words to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” just last night at the Hollywood Bowl), and I loved America.
My parents were blue-collar, a machinist (later a gunsmith) and a telephone operator, and they raised us on church, and baseball games, and love and respect of elders, and turkey with stuffing, and all that stuff.
As I grew up, though, that fit me less and less.
Sometimes, in my childhood, boys were just jerks, mean, violent. I never had a group of girls surround me on bikes and spit all over me, or throw worms in my long hair when it rained, or pick on my friend Richard, who was probably gay, and hit him, and hit me if I tried to stop them. But the boys did that. The boys told me I couldn’t play run-the-bases, or go in their fort, or go with them to the creek. Not my brother, my brother was always nice, but the boys the same age as me. In school the boys got angry when I got a higher score on the test, like it was a crime, and then would do something, “Race you to that pole!” to prove they could beat me. Or just knock into me in the hall, or hold my locker door closed when I was trying to get my books out. I loved my father and brother. I loved baseball and hockey and boxing. I wanted to hang out with the guys and the girls, but the guys weren’t usually welcoming, and they really didn’t want to hear my ideas on how to do things, at church or at school. And there were plenty of girls who were always ready to defend the guys being just as jerky as they wanted to be, if it meant they got asked to the prom. I also wanted to go to prom, but not that much.
As I grew up I was always more of a reader than most, and so I read the Sunday paper, and the Bible, and the school textbooks, and the encyclopedias that we had (I think we had through J), and the Atlas. I knew what the books said, and I knew what I thought about what I read. A lot of the guys hadn’t read, but they knew with certainty what they thought, and I had better not say different. And their girlfriends agreed.
In college, when I was living in an apartment near University of Pennsylvania, the neighbor guys threw ketchup and mustard on my apartment door, and banged up my bike locked up in the hall, because of my Geraldine Ferraro poster, which they tore down and tore up. Guys were always telling me I had too much to say, and too many opinions, and read too much.
Much later, when I signed up to adopt from China, I joined a Yahoo group for adopters-to-be, and quickly learned that a vocal group of waiting parents were fundamentalist Christians, and they didn’t want anyone using rainbows for anything, or to adopt while gay, or to really like China at all, which was, in the views they often espoused, a bad place full of bad people whose children needed rescuing.
I watched the Watergate hearings as a small child. When the cartoons were over on Saturday mornings, I stayed for the hearings until my mom shooed me away. I was so disappointed in Nixon. I thought Ford was a kindly but ineffective man. I thought Carter was great; I wanted to meet him. I despised Reagan, and both Bushes, and I was thrilled about Clinton, but more thrilled about Mrs. Clinton. I was devasted when Bill cheated on his wife.
I don’t know where I’m going with this except that, when I was young, I loved being a USA booster, and as I aged, I have felt more and more pushed out, like my kind of person wasn’t the right kind of American, and I’m white and straight! For those who aren’t, the pushing must feel so much more constant.
When I went to see Hamilton last fall, all my patriotism was re-awakened. My god what they did to get this country made! What they had the imaginations to plan for in the future, and what they were willing to give up to make this dream country!
But then, less than a month after I saw it, so many people voted for the wrong person. Now, I agree, we can compare and agree to disagree on John McCain and Mitt Romney vs. Barak Obama or the like. But we cannot do that on the current occupant of the White House. The man elected in 2024 has done nothing but egregious activities his entire adult life, and yet he brings out the patriotism in so many people, people, I would argue, who have no idea what patriotism is, and what it means to be an American in the America created by those founders whose stories are told in Hamilton. My father, who taught me to love baseball and boxing, and my brother, who taught me to love hockey and catch tadpoles, would have been horrified by elected officials being shot in their homes by a fake cop, and would have been disappointed in a president who could not bring himself to offer condolences to their governor. Where are men like them? Where are the real patriots? I feel like I’ve been in states of disbelief, grief, confusion, amazement, and panic since the fall election. I have moments where I want to take my small family, and our friends, and run for another country. But when you’re from the country that kicks everyone out, can you really ask another country to let you in?
I haven’t put out a flag for Flag Day or the 4th of July in years. I am an American patriot, but not for this version of America. And I wish I could have my pride and patriotism back. For me, it’s almost like the 4thof July has been sucked into “the upside down,” where everything I’ve loved about this country has been changed to its most perverse opposite. I know that what people like me lost from our country we lost in tiny little pieces, from, in my lifetime, the pardoning of Nixon foreword, in the name of trying to give space to two sides that are really not equal at all. As the short and fantastic film Here Be Dragons says, “Math class doesn’t give equal time to 2+2=5.” But we did. I lost my patriotism, and many lost much much more. I don’t think it’s something barbecue or patriotic sneakers or colored explosions can fix.
Today my beautiful lady head is holding iris and Veronica. I once saw neighbors rip up an enitre patch of iris and throw them away I asked if I could have them, but they said no because they didn’t like them, so they didn’t want to see them anywhere. Can you imagine? They put in something foul, like geraniums. When I return from the temporary status as renter back to home owner, iris are absolutely in the plan. Veronica I wasn’t aware of until this year, which is painful to admit. They are absolutely brilliant flowers, long lasting, straight and tall with sometimes a graceful curve to them. They’re a real eye-catcher. A friend once took a plant pot filling class, and was told that if you plant a pot you should have a filler, and spiller, and a thriller. Veronica is the thriller. Cost for flowers, about $11 at Trader Joe’s. Also pictured… future Chex mix!
That is the wonderful duo of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.
My mother loved musicals when I was a kid, so I heard a lot of them. I used to ride my bike up and down our blue collar alley singing “Climb Every Mountain” at the top of my lungs…, you know, like all the cool kids. I once was a very high soprano, but now I am definitly a mezzo-soprano, if not a baritone.
Jeanette MacDonald went to school with my grandmother (one year ahead of her), which is what every old person in Philadelphia used to claim, but in our case it was true, and I know this because my grandmother, Sara, who never lied, and could not sing, told me she thought it was dumb, Jeanette doing all those “La la las” after school. My grandmother also told us that stolen flowers grow best, so there you go. My grandmother never knew her father, who ran off and joined the Canadian (French?) foreign Legion while my grandmother was still incubating inside her mother. Story goes her father got a new Canadian family, and died in WWI. So, of course, my grandmother had nothing to sing about and stole flowers. Of course. And so she walked home each day past Jeanette’s house where she could hear Jeanette singing. My grandmother wanted to play the piano more than anything, and knew a few tunes (“Jesus Loves Me,” “Cowslips,” and two-thirds of “Rose of Waikiki.”), but did not have the resources Jeanette had, and was certainly envious of those singing lessons, and the piano in the house.
In any case, family history and legend aside, my mother quite liked Jeanette MacDonald, and my mother was also a soprano. I remember the movies Jeanette made with Nelson Eddy were so corny, but she also made the movie about the San Francisco earthquake with Clark Cable, which was tragic and maybe a bit less corny, and had the stirring song about San Franciso in it.
In any case, I was a huge fan of her work, and I just loved this song that the duo did together, and “Indian Love Call,” (probably racist film and movie… but loved the song!)
and I also loved Rosemarie by Nelson on his own.
As corny as everything about them is, they had a tragic love life, if you read their Wikipedia pages, all brought about by the Hollywood studios trying to control them not getting divorced, which put Jeanette, who suffered with a weak heart, into a marriage of domestic violence. Really as tragic as their films often seemed! And they both died in their early 60s, which is also sad. They had money, fame, and privilege, but were denied the thing they wanted the most, each other.
“Will You Remember,” the first song inserted at the top of this post, has a habit of popping into my head on random, and I end up singing it for an entire week, in the shower, in the car, in my dreams. Hopefully you’ll find something to enjoy in these fantastic old tunes, and, if you do, join in, and see if you can hit those high notes!
May they be clasped in each others’ arms in the great beyond….
Back when Target was still DEI-cool, I bought myself this head planter. I never quite had the right plant to put in it though, and I decided to use it as a vase instead. I especially like the way the flowers come out the the head and look almost like hair, or a fancy hat.
I buy myself flowers. All the time. I buy them at least twice a month, depending on how long they last. I admit to really loving them and not wanting to throw them away or compost them until they’re really spent. Today I went into my local Vons (I usually get pretty and inexpensive flowers from Trader Joe’s, but they had nothing interesting a few days ago when I stopped in for half and half.), and found these cool tie-dyed roses. I thought they were perfect for celebrating Pride. I’m straight and cis, and a very much in support of Pride, and trans rights, and gay marriage, and all that good stuff. And I love flowers, and fun, colorful, or heavily-scented , off-beat, exotic, just about any kind. (Except geraniums, but that’s a post for another day!)
I just thought these were so pretty and uplifting.
My mother has always considered flowers a waste of money, which seems too sad to me. This bunch of roses and the yellow “filler” cost me ten dollars. That means I’m spending around about 20 bucks a month for a little hit of joy every time I walk into my perpetually untidy kitchen.
Get yourself some flowers and enjoy the color. This is your one life: make it beautiful. Don’t wait for someone else to do it.
I have been taking photos of myself in clothes (lucky for us all! Not naked!) because I love clothes, and I figured I could be brave enough to share that side of myself which you would not know unless you knew me in person.
I also snap a lot of photos of pets, flowers, and, when she lets me, my kid, so the phone gets pretty full. I finally got around to downloading a bunch, and here, for my second (?) clothes post is what I wore back in March to the Atlanta Writer’s conference. It’s a Lucy and Yak Ragan, and my, what are they? Snake? Leopard? I think snake, boots. and some sory of cropped black sweater.
Having been a fat woman for most of my adult life, I often go black in professional situations because it feels safer, cleaner, slimmer. This L&Y Ragan is a USA size 10, as an FYI, so I think I’m down in average size for that, not plus, but I still see me as large, too large, and probably always will.
It was a wonderful day, though, as I had someone come sit at my table with me:
The moment I met Emilie I was in big-time girl love. LOL. Emilie and I are in the same age range, and that’s all anyone needs to know abut that, and she is a person who, the moment we saw each other in person, I felt like I’d known forever. So, even though we’d worked together for many months, to meet her and just hang out was so much fun. Honestly, and I know this is going to sound really dorky to say, but when I work on a book with an author I get really attached to the book, well, because usually I had to likethe book a lot to begin with to want t publish it, and then, because I am a gigantic super-nerd, I am very very excited when I get to meet the author in person. I didn’t ask Emilie for her autograph on her book, but I wanted to. I was really sorry to leave Atlanta. I wished I could have hung out the rest of the week with Emilie. Does anyone else out there feel like there’s never enough time for connection and just fun? Back on the plane, and, that week, home to a huge amount of chaos as an exchange student had come while I was in Atlanta, and the exchange student was a delight, but she was only staying for a week, and it happened to be the same week (the school, IMHO, arranged it badly) the kids the vsiting students were staying with all had all their midterm stuff due, and my chronically procrastinating child was losing her mind when I arrived back in the house, much to the chagrin of the poor the exchange student. So Mom was on immediate duty, and, oh, how I thought back fondly on hanging out with Emilie. Being a mom to my daughter is one of the best joys in my life, but it is not lost on me that when you become a spouse, and then a parent, you are giving up most of your allowance of fun. So you have to get it in where you can. I would love to escape to Atlanta with Emilie again, or anywhere. She felt like a lifelong friend right away, and she’s also an interesting and talented author.
And, I veered a bit off of my outfit, but, what can I say? I’m a veerer.
It’s getting dark outside as I write this, and I have the door open. We live one block off of the restaurant street, and sometimes, like tonight, there are people who are rambunctious in the street. I’ve heard yelling, some fireworks, sirens, dogs barking. Everyone wants to be seen, to matter, to have some attention, and we get squeezed too thin sometimes, and we get loud, when we get a chance to have some fun, to loosen up the reigns. Everyone is guilty of some loud times, but the breeze and the temperature are too nice to allow a little noise to make me close the door. Whever you are, I hope it’s a nice, if slightly loud, spring evening. Sleep tight.
On the West Coast, where I am, it’s the quiet before the cacophony. If you have only celebrated the Fourth of July in an East Coast town, or the Midwest, I venture to say you don’t know what noise is. You cannot imagine the noise, the joy, of absolute celebration that starts last week and continues on for days after in a place where there are large swatchs of people from cultures that brought with them to this place a history of celebrating with fireworks and explosions, and an absolute love for their chosen country. And I think we ought to say, whether the United States of America is the country where you first took a breath or the country you came to later, to stay here, or to be here always, is a choice, and so it is the chosen country of even those for who it is the first and only country they have ever seen.
When I was a child I loved the Fourth of July. I had sparklers, and my patriotic clothing, and I decorated my bike, and the fathers and sons of Ridley Park played baseball in the field behind our house, and the mosquitoes chowed down, and we lit punks from the crick to ward them off, and had Pepsi’s in glass bottles, and hot dogs and potato salad to eat, and we wound through the working class streets to the fire department for the fireworks after the sun went down. I don’t think I had any idea that my neighbohood was very much a place where everyone was the same. I don’t think I understood, aside from the notion that some of us were Catholics and some of us were Methodists, how much all the families were just alike, and living in carbon-copy twin homes, and eating the same meals each day, with fried eggs for breakfast, Lebanon bologna sandwiches for lunch, and pork and beans from a can for dinner.
When my mother moved us to the town where her sister lived, the sister who had married the cardiologist, we found ourselves working class among people who were not, among people who were wealthy and never made a sound outside of their houses beyond the sound of their lawnmowers, among Methodists who didn’t have potluck suppers twice a month. Some of the neighbors were Jewish, and I didn’t know what that was until we read Anne Frank’s diary in sixth grade. Some of the kids in my school grade, about eight of them, came from the tail-end of the town, down around the train tracks, and they were Black, and they lived in clapboard houses that had been cut up by floor into apartments so that they could be stacked on top of each other, and the houses had been surrounded by train tracks and truck routes and second-hand stores, and they had a long walk home after school. There was one girl in my grade who was Korean, but her parents were white. There was another girl who told me she was adopted, but she looked just like her parents. And still another friend was Morman, and her mother sent me home from her house when, as all of us played on the trampoline her family had in the yard, I bounced off and yelled out, “Oh my God I almost died!” Her mother told me I was a bad girl, and had to leave. Because we went to church, in my opinion, all the time, and my mother and I sang in the choir, and my parents, my “churchy” parents, said, “Goddamit!” whenever they dropped an egg or spilled something, I did not understand at all exactly what had gone wrong.
When I commuted into Philadelphia for college, on the trolly and then the El, and finally the subway, I could watch the demographics change as I moved from my quiet quiet town closer to the most left-behind part of the city. It was noiser, dirtier, and a lot more people said, “Goddamit,” pretty much any place at all, even in the offices of the school, even in class, or yelling on the subway. Once I was walking to the subway before the end of fall term on a very cold night, and the row homes lining the street had metal sheets over the doors and windows, and one house had a chink missing out of the metal over the window, and I saw a tree inside with Christmas lights on it.
In college I met Rick and Randy, my first gay friends, so handsome, so fun, rommates and friends with benefits, who ironed their jeans (!) and patiently explained to me that sometimes men loved other men.
I could go on with my brief summary of how I learned about difference in the world, but really, it’s not that interesting.
Sometimes the difference has challenged me, and I’ve had to recalibrate my thinking and tell myself that someone who is noisier than I would prefer is still a human being, or someone who tells me I can’t say “Oh God!” in their house is not mean, or someone whose food is comprised of animal parts I would never eat is not weird, and the women holding hands and kissing at the bar where I kissed my boyfriend the prior night are not wrong for their PDA if I was not wrong for mine. And all of us can love this country.
No one owns the flag more than anyone else (except maybe Betsy Ross: seamstress extraordinaire, who is also from Philly!). Yet sometimes I feel like people among us are redefining patriotism in a way that leaves me out. I was so excited for the Foruth of July when I was a young girl, and I still think this country is pretty great. Yes, it’s messy, but all experiements are messy. Everyone who first opened their eyes in this country, and everyone who chose to emmigrate here, is part of that experiment, is part of the tweaking and re-working all experiements go through. And my life was great as a kid in that small working class town, and it is better for each new experience my path through the world has brought me. Each new place, experience, person has enriched my biography, not ruined it because it did not stay static.
The country is in a bit of a mess right now, and that mess, to me, means that something is being worked out, the wheels are turning to make a change. I feel like, given its track record, this country will find its way to a good, new version of itself, even as some of the forces try to push it back to the summers when only the men played baseball in the field on the Fourth of July. As good a time as that was, it left me out. Now, not that I’m a stellar second baseman, but this experiment was begun, all those years ago, by people who wanted a chance to create a place were no one as left out. Of course, at the time, they meant only men, but the experiment was set in motion to see if it was possible to create a place that would have fairness as its guiding principle, as its ultimate goal.
Fairness as a guiding principle? Count me in for that!
Dianne Pearce Writes 