Our insect friends
Earlier this week, on my way to work, I passed under the el tracks at Broadway and saw, there, in the grayest, urbanest, cement-and-asphalt-est stretch of sidewalk on the whole north side, a bright green katydid. It was a tiny thing in a livid shade of spring green, sitting there casually in the middle of the sidewalk as if I wouldn't see it because of its camoflage. And certainly, had I been in the park, or the garden, I wouldn't have seen it — but this stretch of sidewalk is greenless, without even weeds growing in the cracks.
The very next day I was approaching the same train station in a bit of a hurry. Approaching the door in a bit of a hurry, I very nearly missed the praying mantis perched on the window, facing downward, stuck to that smooth vertical glass as though glued there. This praying mantis was unlike others I've seen in that it had a reddish brown tone to its back, fading to green at the edges, as opposed to being all leaf green like the katydid. Generally, large insects give me the heebie-jeebiees... but a praying mantis is such a rare and special sighting, I can't help but take it as a good omen.
It feels good to see such signs of nature in the midst of the city. On the other had, my house is about half a mile from the el station, and we are overrun with rabbits, not to mention squirrels, sparrows, and billions of gnats and fruitflies.
Labels: drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 11:49 PM
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E La Bambina Si Chiama...
On Sunday morning, in a rather beautiful ceremony, we learned the name of Mila and Eli's baby girl: Yelena Meira Lifshen. Her Hebrew name is Yael.
The Jewish tradition is to name a child in honor of a deceased relative — never a living one — and the names are explained during the ceremony.
Yelena is after Mila grandmother Helen, Yelena being a Slavic version of Helen, and I expect it's what grandmother Helen would have been called in Serbian. Mila gave a wonderful speech about her grandmother, honoring not just those things that many of us remember about grandmothers, like warmth, generosity, and roasted chickens, but also those things that made her very unique in her time — her getting divorced and raising five children alone.
Meira is Hebrew for "light", and was chosen in honor of Eli's brother Moshe, who died last year. (It is enough that "Moshe" and "Meira" both begin with M, and that "Meira" was specifically chosen in honor of Moshe.) Eli's speech about his brother was extremely beautiful and moving; there was much crying, and it was all I could do not to break down myself. I wanted to draw a picture of this. At one point I looked up and saw Eli reading his speech and his father standing next to him, red-faced and crying. I sat down yesterday to sketch this, and couldn't. I hadn't seen enough. I'd looked away to regain composure. I know that Mila was on Eli's other side with Yelena, and I know Eli's mother was on his father's other side, but I looked away too soon to remember the scene well enough. But I was very touched, and I wanted to convey that with more than words.
There were other elements to the ceremony as well: Yelena's first taste of wine, the grandparents wrapping her in Eli's
tallit. The we had a brunch of muffins, bread, poached salmon, quiche, and a lovely blackberry-plum cake.
Labels: personal
posted by Tony at 10:49 PM
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Zoning, yay
The zoning commission approved our plan to relocate our driveway, so that's good news. That took just a couple of days. The next step is approval from Streets and Sanitation, and a hundred subcommittees. So now we wait and twiddle our thumbs.
Labels: personal
posted by Tony at 7:44 AM
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José Saramago
I'm reading
Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago, these days. I was feeling up to a challenging read, and Saramago does not disappoint. This morning I read a paragraph that was 7½ pages long.
Saramago favors run-on sentences. What begins at the top of the page on one subject may wend down to the middle and pass through a number of subjects. The overall effect is of observing a world where there are no boundaries between people, events, and times — a sort of general haze.
So is it worth it? Tough question. Sometimes it's thoroughly engaging, and other times I get tired. This is my third book of his.. I must like it or I wouldn't keep doing it, right? Or maybe I just like reading a book with a badge on it labelling it a Nobel Prize winner.
When I'm done with this I should dive right into Moby Dick, which will feel like a warm bath in comparison.
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ADDENDUM:
I wrote this before leaving work to go home, and on the way home, read some more. Here's a passage I'd like to share. We have just been introduced to Signor Domenico Scarlatti, the Italian harpsichord teacher of the young Portuguese princess (the "Infanta"). After the lesson, the King, Queen, and Infanta leave, and we are left with the musician, as well as the priest Bartolomeu Lourenço, who is one of the main characters.
The Italian fingered the keyboard of the harpsichord, first at random, then as if searching for a motif or attempting to modify certain reverberations, and suddenly he appeared to be totally absorbed in the music he was playing, his hands running over the keayboard like a barge flowing on the current, arrested here and there by branches overhanging the riverbanks, then away at rapid speed before vacillating over the distended waters of a deep lake, the luminous bay of Naples, the mysterious and echoing canals of Venice, over the bright, shimmering light of the Tagus, there goes the King, the Queen has already retired to her apartments, the Infanta is bent over her embroidery frame, for an Infanta learns these things from childhood, and music is a profane rosary of sounds, Our Mother who art on earth.
It's all one sentence, and it needs to be to convey that feeling of music sweeping you across all places and all things in your life, and to establish that Scarlatti is no ordinary man, but a man of deep feeling and visceral understanding.
So my answer is, yes, it's worth it.
Labels: journal, personal
posted by Tony at 6:06 PM
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Happy Julia Child's Birthday
Today is, or would be, Julia Child's birthday. Lacking the energy to arrange anyting larger, Eric and I celebrated the life of the grand dame of American cooking with a nice dinner of steak Diane, frites, green beans, and a green salad. (Yes, "frites" — we made our own french fries. Well, Eric did it. I watched.) It was all lovely.
We also spent the weekend watching old episodes of The French Chef, which we have on DVD. Ah, Julia, we miss you.
Labels: personal
posted by Tony at 11:12 PM
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Bambina
Thursday morning at 3am Mila gave birth to a beautiful 6-and-change-pound baby girl. I stopped by the house on Friday evening about 5 minutes after they'd gotten home themselves. They both looked tired but happy. Feeling a need to be useful (you can't just decend on the home of people with a newborn and not make yourself useful) I helped Eli assemble the crib, a complicated adjustable co-sleeper dealie.
The baby, whose name we will learn in a couple of weeks at a naming ceremony called a Brit Bat, is lovely and sweet-tempered, with a full head of black hair. Who does she resemble most? If you'll forgive the unsentimental response, I think newborn babies more closely resemble each other than anyone else. But she's still a cutie.
However I think I'll make up for an unsentimental response with this rather sentimental picture. Is the composition a little trite? Let's just say that there's something about a day-old baby that makes you think of the classics. On the other hand, I have no good excuse for why the people in the drawing only passingly resemble Mila and Eli. I really wanted this to be a better picture than it is. But things don't always go the way that I plan.
Labels: drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 9:23 PM
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