jardin anglais

They were out for a walk in the park that Sunday afternoon, as they tried to walk in the park every Sunday afternoon, weather fair or fowl. Today they wore their splendid Sunday best, prepared for not only the walk in the park, but also for the luncheon and the afternoon tea and the quiet beat of late afternoon before cocktails are served. Their hats were garlanded with roses, their skirts rustled, they exuded the scent of peonies, as all around the gardens they strolled, waiting patiently to feed the ducks or admire a newly planted bed or watch children or the civilized variety float boats or children of the urchin variety turn cartwheels or immaculate poodles delicately prance along the clipped lanes, all the time filled with the chatter chatter chatter of women of many opinions and few fears.

Behind them trailed a man, a man without a hat, a man without a mustache, a man in a seersucker suit attempting to look inconspicuous as only a hatless man in seersucker can appear. He smoked a cigarette out of a sense of duty rather than interest, and realized that seersucker was not quite the look he intended to convey, just as they passed by the indifferent poodle. Perhaps next time he would try for the sober grey Irish linen, for a pipe instead of a cigarette, but pipes seemed rather more obvious, more memorable.

He was tracking the movements of the woman in the middle, the mousy one, with a too narrow nose and wide set eyes, for she had declined to permit her husband a divorce and he was determined to be free of the entanglement so as to move on to new opportunities, an if this meant gathering evidence against her, well, he was willing to find a detective to fill in some of her blanks. He, the detective, had taken one glance at the mousy woman, decided her husband, his client, was a cad and no gentleman, but continued trailing the woman due to the devastating beauty of her companions.

He did not notice the ducks, the children, the urchins, or the other inhabitants of the park, until suddenly he found himself disoriented, the woman disappeared down one of several branching paths when his mind wandered for a moment, and he stood, helplessly smoking his cigarette, uncertain what to do next.

While he stood, pensive, a swarm of children of the urchin variety passed by, removing his wallet, keys, and pocket watch, discarding the neatly typed card that read CERTIFIED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR from the top of the bridge, and hopping, skipping, running back to their corner of the park to divide the loot. There was a certain amount of disagreement as to the proper disposal of a pocket watch, for it had a ship engraved upon the cover, and inside, an inscription in Greek or middle English or Italian, the boy who knew his letters best couldn't be certain which, and they were tempted to keep it as their prize, a talisman against evil spirits, a portal into a different world, but it was real gold, and the pawn shop might trade a pretty penny if they could have an uncle or older brother fence it without retaining too large a fee.

So they argued and fought and turned cartwheels and remembered to stay away from the park police, who that day was the old man who felt the only children in parks should be of the civilized variety, well-escorted and well-scrubbed, and who would beat urchins who failed to meet his expectations of childhood presentation. His own children had been far to terrified to ever utter a word in his presence; he failed to comprehend how other children could be so uncontrolled.

Across the park, rowboats waiting for passengers, a coin providing not entrance into the underworld but passage to a small island in the center of a pond, a gazebo, and a trained parrot who could, on quiet days when the wind blew across the water, be heard reciting her mixed up limericks on the shore. Originally the rowboats merely led to the island and gazebo, a favored destination for sweethearts still in the early days of devotion, but the overseer had inherited the parrot from an eccentric great aunt who had traveled the world, and his wife refused to allow a limerick quoting parrot in her house, under any circumstances whatsoever, and so the parrot took up residence in the boathouse at night and gazebo during the day.

Since her installation, boat rentals had doubled, and he was considering adding additional accessories to the small island. A llama, perhaps? Although he wasn't certain whether a llama would adapt to twice daily excursions to and fro in a rowboat. Perhaps an aquarium could be set up on the island, or a large iguana. Meanwhile, the parrot recited and sang and repeated verses taught to her by sailors, explorers, and idlers, the rowboats embarked, and spring came fully into bloom.

The group of ladies reached the summit of the hill, thankful to be free of their follower at last, and gazed down over the lawns and profuse perennials, trying to decide if it was quite tea time, if the climate of Canada would be suitable, if it was true that Australia had animals with duck bills and webbed feet and furry coats, and if these odd creatures were kept domestically like cats or rabbits.

If they were to emigrate, would one go first, examine the local scenery, houses, perhaps purchase a ranch or establish a school, then send for the other women once things were in order? Or would it be more effective to travel as a group, perhaps overwhelming the inhabitants, but with strength and determination in their numbers? They had engaged upon this discussion every Sunday afternoon as they walked through the park for the past two years, and were no nearer a decision. Canada or Australia? A ranch or a life in the city or on a farm? Alone or at once, together? Still they circled, flying away on early Sunday afternoons, to return to the demands of the tea table, the school room, the garden party, the nursery, escape just a breath or two away.

The private detective stopped to purchase a lime ice, realized his wallet was missing, and returned home, expecting to find it forgotten on his dresser. Its absence was still not noticed several hours later, his attention having been diverted by a hand delivered note, demanding he catch the next possible ride back to the family home, due to urgent business.

A three hour journey with no more notice than that; three hours for what might be a heart attack or a sudden onset of the flu or a new litter of kittens or a roasted duck for Sunday dinner or an announcement that his father had decided to sell the family land and enter business, once and for all, open a haberdashery or a grocer's or a tea import exchange or manufacture woolens; these imperative demands were generally equally vague and equally vacuous, but once one had led to the discovery of his grandfather dead of mysterious causes in the pigsty, so it was best to heed the call.

The urchins decided to keep the pocket watch as a talisman, and the parrot recited in French as the last rowboat crossed the lake, returning her to the boathouse.

---

reading


weather
clear nights of June

hideaway

There was a door in the back of the closet; a small, square door, two feet across and two feet up, not exactly flush with the floorboards but only a bit above, three or four inches. It was covered not with a paneled door with a knob, but was just a matching section of wallboard held in place with a piece of wood with a screw in the middle. Rotate the wood, door removes. Rotate the wood, door locks into place.

But where did it go? What was on the other side of the closet wall? Scattered amongst the accessories of a life, the shoes, bags, boxes, fallen hangers, was the entrance to some type of hideaway, an escape, if it would be possible to shimmy through a two foot by two foot opening when under duress or prosecution, which seems unlikely; the fear causing clumsiness and awkward movements and therefore noise, attracting unwanted attention.

Perhaps the door led to a fallout shelter, constructed at the height of the cold war fears, when being a lone refuge in a squalid closet underground was preferable to joining all of one's friends, neighbors, colleagues in instant death, for undoubtedly the survivors would, somehow, find one another, rebuild society, and this potential duty was important enough to make six months in a fallout shelter in the crawlspace under a house worthwhile, meaningful, invigorating, endless games of solitaire by the light of a candle or a windup flashlight, a radio powered by stockpiled batteries or a portable generator desperately scanning the airwaves for news bulletins, notices, messages from other members of the fall out shelter crowd, a clock, a calendar, a daily regimen of sit-ups and push-ups to keep the body from atrophying while in confinement.

Six months of canned foods, six months of total darkness except for a daily allowance of candlelight, six months of reading books on hunting and killing and cooking squirrels and raccoons, books on farming, books on building houses, books on maintaining fences, books on self-defense, to be left with the basic questions: What if one eats a radioactive squirrel? How can lettuce and tomatoes grow in radioactive soil? Who needs to build houses when so much real estate will be vacant? Why is there no fiction or humor in the bunker library collection? What about setting broken bones, or removing limbs with gangrene?

Six months in a bomb shelter crawl space, and the desire to survive and take part in the great remaking of society will be overwhelmed by the desire to commit suicide from claustrophobia, boredom, and loneliness.

Perhaps the door led to a wall mounted ladder, leading up between the walls of the house to the roof, another hatch, and suddenly: freedom, the night air, stars overhead, and tree branches and fences and the roofs of storage sheds close by leading to an escape from bedtimes and curfews and instead offering access to everything, every house, every street, every neighborhood after dark. Nights of clambering up and down trees, nights of dancing in alleyways, nights of singing, nights of rambling across and among and beyond the citizens of the parallel world of after dark, people whose eyelids have glitter, whose shoes have heels, whose footsteps have rhythm, whose voices have a deep, smokey, half whispered quality, their slang a language all its own.

The nights filled with dancing with strangers and running from unsavory encounters and drinking bitter coffee at mysterious food trucks that disappear with the dawn, scampering back along fences and up trees and across the roof and down the ladder and into bed, to fall asleep during algebra class, no concept of the quadratic equation able to compare to the winks, whispers, quick steps, half heard songs of the world of the night.

One night it rains, the roof is slippery, but still the night world awaits, glistening, strong drinks in dark bars down alleyways that weren't there that afternoon, stories told by men of indeterminate age of other lands, other adventures, near escapes from death or capture by men or by beasts, stories which only grew more compelling, more bewitching as the rain fell harder and the night hours slowly clicked into dawn. Until one night, wandering, lost, following an imperative voice deeper and deeper into the parallel city of night, when dawn suddenly breaks and the city is empty, forsaken: without the re-entrance through the roof back into the world of the day, there is no way out of the world of the night, no landmarks, no memories of places, no people, no maps, just the hollow silhouettes of abandoned buildings.

Perhaps the door was purely utilitarian, the electrical fuses, some old buckets of paint from a living room redecoration unknown years ago, a brush that was stored without being properly cleaned, a mousetrap empty, not even set, the smell of dust and dark and forgotten stories, a space not even large enough to hide in for hide and seek.

Perhaps the door was added by the previous owner, a woman of many eccentricities and few consistencies, a woman hounded by fears of alien abductions, tax inquiries, check fraud, lost love letters, missing socks, electromagnetic poison, rabid house cats, satanic teenagers, cars which reported one's every drive to the government, a woman who stored gold coins as the only real currency, a woman who believed canned foods put lithium into consumer's diets so they wouldn't rage revolutions, a woman with a shot gun behind the front door and a knife hidden in the heel of her stiletto.

She had left the house years ago, convinced the electrical wiring was recording all her conversations, and evidence of her stay had all but disappeared, only visible by scraps of aluminum foil along the corners of the ceilings, penciled notes inside closet doors in an unreadable code. And the small door, forgotten, in the back of the bedroom closet, and behind the door, a space just large enough to stand up in, a place to hide from siblings or parents or tornadoes, a place to store treasures. Hours and hours of searching the space, with fingers and with flashlight, and nothing. No keys to safe deposit boxes or post office boxes or houses or cars, no coat check tickets, no movie stubs, no letters, no empty envelopes, no notes on the walls, no loose floorboards, no cubbyholes, no secrets, until one afternoon, there, just where the wall joins the ceiling -- a crack, a slip of paper, the pencil so faded as to almost disappear, the paper crumpled and creased, only one word legible: REMEMBER.

No one at the library or the historical society or the town hall knows anything concrete about the woman, can verify her name or her birth date or where she is now, if she's even still alive, although a clerk thinks her cousin said something about an old farm several hours away, a long term health care aid, a death from cancer or old age, but no one is really certain. The farm burned down last spring, the land bulldozed for a new strip mall development. Maybe she was right about the aliens and the electrical wiring and the rabies, and maybe she was crazy, but REMEMBER. What? And how?

Perhaps the door led to a dusty crawl space beneath the house, filled with the strangely thin skeletons of hot water pipes and the housing for wiring, the nests of mice and the memories of snakes and lizards hibernating from winter, too little clearance to explore properly, too many animals hidden in the dirt to enjoy the exploration, but maybe -- a litter of kittens, an old lunch box filled with a baseball card collection, a dismembered plastic doll, a broken sea shell, an empty beer bottle.

The crawl space might be just tall enough for a child somewhat shy of adolescence to stand up in, to find the ghosts of other children who played in the crawlspace, to play tag and checkers and house and tea party, although not hide and seek since ghosts are never certain what they're seeing or where they're hiding. The crawl space is only large enough for one real child and two or three ghosts, although there are more ghosts than that waiting in the shadows, some shy and some just the outlines of ghosts, not real ghosts at all. But two of the memories of children are most often present, waiting for the door to slip open and to be joined by their compatriot, eager for stories of school or church or field trips to the zoo. One day, the crawl space is tighter, then tighter still: adulthood looms, a toy car added to the collection under the house, as interests turn to dances and soccer games and cars and movies, the memories of past children forgotten.

Or perhaps the door is actually nailed shut, no longer opens, since the injunction to stay away from the closet, don't mess about, was always strictly obeyed. The door may go anywhere, hide anything or nothing, heaven or hell.

---

reading
Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions [vol. 1] / Martin Gardner

weather
the livin' is easy / fish are jumpin' / and the cotton is high

a bonny Bloomsday

Week II of early summer interlude. Regular schedules resume next week; all interim correspondence has been of the nature of righteous indignation towards government institutions, which will not be reprinted here.

reading
I should be reading Joyce. A close second: the amazing "Dada in Paris." Best purchase in years.

weather
In honor of, Irish, to the core. Looking for an antique umbrella recovering service.

intermission

Spending a research evening rather than a writing evening.

reading
as before, with the addition of a vodka tonic and Trio Mediaeval's Folk Songs

weather
very British, in celebration of which, meatloaf

Möbius strips of verbiage

Ah, June, deadlines met with procrastinations met with vacation plans met with trapeze lessons. Moving, traveling, traversing, and fighting against the rain. The beginning of the month transposed to the end of the month, with the odd birthday here and there thrown in to keep things off kilter.


This month's project, thanks to late-night Economist reading (obituary: Martin Gardner)
is all about making multi-dimensional geometric forms ("a conjuror introduced him to the hexaflexagon, a piece of paper folded into an almost flat six-sided shape that could be manipulated to reveal a series of different interiors") : a four dimensional Möbius strip!



Ah, Google. Ah, mathematicians. The free exchange of knowledge brought gloriously to life. The following were made using the first search results for "hexaflexagon," a paper pattern which I interpreted as being 7 one-inch sections, with 1 inch bases, and a youtube video, which provided the multi-dimensional context for doing what when and where.



Some notes. I used double sided tape and copier paper. My glue stick, as ever, was dried out and didn't stick. The copier paper was not a color I would normally have chosen, but it was in the art drawer. These are rough drafts of projects that will receive more attention throughout the summer, so bear with the wonky folds and questionable text layouts. Other search terms to become acquainted with:
Kaleidocycle
Flexagon



The text of "Places" is from DYP! June 2; what I love about this form is that multiple story-lines without beginning or end can be played against each other, and this piece was in the parallel plot department.



The second piece, "Artist's Conscience," came from two separate conversations, one on the need to develop an artistic conscience ("get work done now!") and one on having a truculent routine, in that my daily routine must be shy or have other issues, since it often can't be found. Is it hiding under the couch? Sulking in the closet?



But "truculent" wasn't exactly the word that we used in our conversation. I can't remember the word, and hoped consulting a thesaurus would trigger the neurons. It didn't, but here's the text of "Conscience":



{with all due thanks to the Mac dictionary application)

truculent
antonym cooperative, amiable.
defiant, aggressive, antagonistic, combative,
belligerent, pugnacious, confrontational, ready for a fight,
obstreperous, argumentative, quarrelsome, uncooperative;
bad-tempered, ornery, short-tempered, cross,
snappish, cranky; feisty, spoiling for a fight.

defiant
antonym cooperative.
intransigent, resistant, obstinate,
uncooperative, noncompliant, recalcitrant;
obstreperous, truculent, dissenting,
disobedient, insubordinate, subversive,
rebellious, mutinous, feisty.

intransigent
antonym compliant.
uncompromising, inflexible, unbending,
unyielding, diehard, unshakable, unwavering,
resolute, rigid, unaccommodating,
uncooperative, stubborn, obstinate, obdurate,
pigheaded, single-minded, iron-willed, stiff-necked.

uncompromising
antonym flexible.
inflexible, unbending, unyielding, unshakable,
resolute, rigid, hard-line, immovable, intractable,
inexorable, firm, determined, obstinate,
stubborn, adamant, obdurate, intransigent, headstrong,
stiff-necked, pigheaded, single-minded, bloody-minded.

weather

As soon
Seek roses in December, ice in June;
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff;
Believe a woman or an epitaph,
Or any other thing that ’s false, before
You trust in critics.

George Gordon, Lord Byron

reading
Dada in Paris / Michel Sanouillet

The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess / Andrei Codrescu

Bauhaus 1919-1933 : workshops for modernity / [organized by] Barry Bergdoll, Leah Dickerman.

Big ideas for growing mathematicians : exploring elementary math with 20 ready-to-go activities

Mathematics appreciation : ten complete enrichment lessons / Theoni Pappas

Hexaflexagons and other mathematical diversions : the first Scientific American book of puzzles

Polyhedron models / Magnus J. Wenninger

labyrinth

Places.

A small post-war ranch style house, built in a line and painted salmon pink. Three bedrooms, one and half baths, a one car attached garage, a dining area extending from the living room, an eat-in kitchen.

A thatched cottage, two bedrooms above one room which serves as living room, dining room, and kitchen. It would be referred to as open plan, except for the miniature size of the cottage; the building of interior walls would have negated the possibility of a small kitchen counter. The washroom is an extension by the back door.

A loft apartment, with no walls at all, and ceilings that extend beyond any measurable height and well beyond the reach of the tallest ladder sold at the hardware store. Taped and tacked to the walls are intricate architectural renderings of a built loft, a staircase, floor to ceiling bookshelves with ladder running along a metal bar and a small balcony, a closet, a bathroom, and a kitchen area. Engineering diagrams of lighting and wiring systems are posted next to the architectural plans. None of these projects have been realized. The space is not yet able to pass electrical codes and thus runs off the grid, not meaning solar but instead implying propane stove, sleeping bag, flashlight, bucket. It has been in this state of occupancy for five years.

A hospital room, semi-private, which would have been less semi and more private if the woman on the other side of the room had talked less and had a smaller family. She was in for a routine foot operation that went dreadfully awry and many of her conversations centered on malpractice suits and the quality of hospital food.

A tent, pitched in the shade of a grove of trees on top of a mountain. There is a cold spigot for running water, but no showers or toilets. There is no electricity or cell phone reception. This was intended to be a honeymoon camping trip, which the groom surprised his bride with upon arrival. She had never been camping before, and has not spoken to him in four days. The marriage has not been consummated. She is clearly trying to determine if an annulment indicates that the wedding gifts must be returned.

An upstairs bedroom of an old farm house, just large enough for a twin bed and a heavy old dresser. Stacked on top of the dresser are clean mismatched socks, a copy of War and Peace, a copy of The Hobbit, a copy of The New Folk Guitar Songbook, a broken watch, and a ukulele. Posters of obscure political figures representing revolutionaries from the middle ages to the present day are stapled, chronologically, along the walls. Underneath the bed, a shoebox contains rolled coins, crumpled bills, a photograph of a man in a fedora circa 1938, a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, an untraceable cell phone, and a bottle of pepper spray.

People.

A seven year old girl with curly red hair pulled into strict pigtails, wearing a frilly shirt and in a sulk because she is not allowed to go on the Girl Scout field trip to the science museum, since it is the same day as her piano recital. She hates playing the piano and she hates her piano teacher who smells of mothballs and peppermint chewing gum and she hates the songs she has to play because they don't have words. She would much rather go to the science museum, because she reads every issue of National Geographic four or five or more times, and she is going to go to college to become a marine biologist. She is going to be so famous they name a television show and a submarine and a ride at Disney Land after her. Not some stupid piano or a no good song without any words.

An old, old man, so old he has lost count of how old he actually is, and when doctors or people from social services ask, he just makes up something that sounds plausible. 98. 102. Ninety eight is good, that's body temperature. One hundred two might be more accurate, though. He is no longer concerned about such matters. His wife died twenty years ago, hit by a drunk driver on her way back from the grocery store on a holiday weekend; they had married just as young as possible, childhood sweethearts, and he found himself confused by so much that remained unfinished. He had learnt about laundry and cooking when he retired, and she took up stained glass and watercolor painting and the house was filled with her half finished projects. Some of them he tried to complete, before shrugging at the futility of it all and returning to the crossword. He had never lived alone, found the silence eerie, began playing the harmonica a bit just to add some noise to the place. His houseplants flourished and a stray cat in the neighborhood adopted him.

A young man, not quite as young as he once was, but still young enough for scraggly hair and half-realized ambitions to represent possibility and not failure. He has had a string of girlfriends who found him complex, compelling, inspiring, charming, and, eventually, too challenging to be worth the effort of upkeep. He dropped out of graduate school on the acquisition of a small but timely inheritance and a lucky spot of venture capital, and dreams. Oh, his dreams: dreams of genetic manipulation in household pets to reduce allergens, dreams of artificial intelligence so that computers can apply formulae and equations and a selected amount of randomness to complete term papers and novels and take care of all trading on Wall Street, dreams of flying machines powered by carbon dioxide and bicycles, dreams of houses constructed of nonrecyclable styrofoam packing peanuts. He has neither shaved nor washed his hair for fourteen months, when the local police gave him a ticket for reckless endangerment and cycling under the influence of substance or substances unknown.

A twenty one year old woman, just on the brink of starting her adulthood, in full traction following a collision with a tree while downhill skiing. She was sober; she was focused; she was a beginner lost on the trails who accidentally wandered onto a more difficult slope and then hit a patch of ice. She had been raised in a strict vegetarian household where Spanish and French were frequently invoked at the dinner table in support of an argument, and had never before seen a daytime soap opera. She's riveted, and now plans to recuperate in Mexico and write telenovella.

A man of twenty eight years of age, twenty four of which have been spent at archaeological digs around the world, his father having specialized in trade routes of the Roman Empire and his mother a dedicated photojournalist who would use the comparative quiet or archaeological digs to write accompanying articles and recover from whatever diseases she had recently caught. He was never formally enrolled in any school system, and so knew a mix of whatever specialties had come through the various camps. Compelling back stories being more valuable than credentials in certain circles, he had completed a PhD residency at Yale and was preparing to move to Oxford in the autumn, to accept the endowed chair in ancient and medieval political economy at Trinity College.

A fifteen year old girl, who is a member of a punk band but secretly prefers bluegrass, whose mother is an Anglican priest and whose father plays French horn in the Boston symphony. Her parents divorced when she was four, which may or may not have coincided with her mother's entry into seminary after many years as a trial lawyer. While her parents are not vocally antagonistic or critical of one another, they have somehow managed to avoid speaking directly to one another in all of the years of her memory. She watches old musicals late at night on the television, and has been slowly and carefully saving her allowance and job earnings to pay for tap dancing lessons. She knows her parents would pay for the lessons if she asked, but then it wouldn't be her world, only her world; they would attend performances and tell their friends and somehow the kids at school would find out, and she'd be forced to give up her place as lead singer in the punk band. She's not ready to make that decision yet.

Puzzle.

There are only two people. The timelines presented are not chronological. They do not all live happily ever after. They all exist simultaneously and never. Hearts were broken and mended, arguments won and lost, truces declared, and, in the end, they never actually met, even though they were married for over 60 years.

---

reading
Drink Your Pudding! guest blogs internationally for Notes from a Cartwheel!

weather
fireflies!