Peaches

Late July,
And in the shimmering heat and humidity
Of Midsummer
I find you suspended there,
Yellow jackets droning around your branches.

In your ripeness
There is no other fruit
Which manages your colors:
Pinks and yellows and bright reds.
A painter's pastel palette,
A still life masterpiece,
The pride of Central Georgia
And upstate Carolina.
The dainty little trees
Rolling away across the hills
Like a chorus line dancing
Away from the curve of the roadway,
The lusciousness of your shape,
Your roundness
Is so feminine;
Your ripe sweetness superb.

In Georgia we name our daughters "peaches" after your example.

If God were to issue prohibition to our parents
Forbidding them from eating of the fruit of your branches
There would be no hesitance before they took that first bite;
The allure would be so great.

Looking ahead

The rain showers we received last night caused the windows at the house to fog over this morning. It appeared as if we were living in a terrarium. I expected to see a lizard or a snake coming around the corner as I ate my breakfast.

When I entered my car an ant was crawling up my shirt. I have had little sensations of critters crawling up my body ever since. I guess they were trying to get away from the rain. We have had so little of it lately, they probably thought it was dangerous. Kind of like drivers in Southern California.

Patti is in Barnesville getting her son signed up for school, which starts on Friday. She is taking the day off and I have arranged to have Kate come in and act as receptionist. She is sitting in her seat, probably going through her emails on the computer.

Yesterday, I came home and Cindy and Kate were discussing her situation. I ultimately ended up going to the grocery for a few things and then driving to our nearby Mexican Restaurant for supper. Everybody seemed to perk up after that.

My sleeping was off last night. I fell asleep on the couch for awhile and everybody kind of abandoned me to my slumber. I woke up and watched a bit of the beginning of a movie and then went upstairs. I fell asleep and slept pretty soundly until about 3:30, when I woke up again and drowsed for an hour or two.

I finally came downstairs and ate breakfast and fell asleep again on the couch. After she finished her shower, Cindy woke me up and I took Tex and the garbage out.

We are looking forward to tomorrow afternoon. Cindy and I are leaving early from work and driving down to Culloden to buy peaches. Then we are driving to Columbus to pick up some documentation from a file at the courthouse. From there, we will go to Country's Barbecue for supper and then attend a baseball game. We are hoping for an entertaining evening at the ballpark.

We have decided that we need to go to the beach. Anybody who has been reading this blog over the past few months knows that the topic has been hovering over my head for quite some time. I think our little family has got to the point where there is no substitute for beachtime, probably in Savannah. We just have to arrange for the wherewithal to pay for it all. We don't intend to take much time off, but knowing Cindy and her schedule, she would definitely like to spend most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the proximity to beach, sand, water, seafood and entertainment. I am for that too. It has been quite some time since I was in Savannah. I am really looking forward to it.

Frank, Maggie and Luke in Atlanta

We drove up to Cobb County to watch nephew Luke play tournament baseball this past Friday. The weather was warm and sunny and the baseball field was tucked back into the back of the school underneath the level of the main road running in front of the school. The Sprayberry High School band was practicing for the oncoming football season and students and parents were interspersed here and there around the campus.

We finally found a sign pointing to the baseball fields entrance, even though the baseball field was the first part of the campus we had found when we came to the High School. It just so happened that there was no easy way to get to the baseball field without driving all the way around the school and parking in the main parking lot. Which, of course, was being used by the band.

Tickets for the event were $10.00, which seemed a little high for high school age baseball, but that apparently is the way things go with teenage sports at that age. I couldn't match up with Frank's investment of $500.00 so Luke could play, and he didn't see any of the tournament.

Frank and Maggie drove up on Friday and visited the University of Georgia in Athens. We got to see them on Saturday, when we drove up to Atlanta to meet them for the World of Coke. As it turned out, the National Black Arts Festival was going on at the same time, so everything around Centennial Olympic Park was covered up with people. Making a command decision, we met them at Atlantic Station and ended up walking around in a drizzle, shopping in the various shops of interest.

We finally ended up in a Sports Bar, where the empty smoking lounge was the best place to sit and talk, despite the fact that Cindy and Maggie couldn't handle the cigar smell which lingered from earlier times. We did get a table on the edges of the main restaurant, where the noise was so loud that it was virtually impossible to hear each other.

So we yelled at each other across the table for awhile. I think a knowledge of sign language would have helped us.

Sunday was much better. We had a delightful meal at Mom and Dad's house and were able to sit around the house and talk about things. Maggie is very witty and reminds me a bit of Kate. Frank was giving Lily a hard time when she tried to call him on his cellphone and Maggie joined in the fun with a pretty good imitation of her father.

I wish we were able to see them more often than we do.

Gravity

Oddly enough,
Eggshells seem to ignore gravity.
On a dim Sunday morning
They are hard to crack neatly,
Leaving their cargo loose
In the black, shallow iron pan,
But there they then sit in the sink
Refusing to go gently down the disposal
Perched lightly on the black rubber
Floating above their ultimate end.

After the morning eggs are eaten
Their remains sit there in the sink
Reminding us of our trespasses.

Portrait of the artist in his boxer shorts

When you are sitting in your college classroom
Listening to the professor drone on
About the changes in literature
Brought on by the work of this artist
The place in history he achieved
By the power of his imagination
Turning the words around on their head
Touching the hearts of his readers
Winging their imaginations to a place of communion
Teaching some sublime jewel
Threshed from the experiences of a young boy
Riding his bike down Roswell Road
Toward Buckhead and the pharmacy on the corner
You don't anticipate the experience
Of answering a call for room service
In some downtown hotel
Walking the tray down the hallway
Knocking on a hotel door, number 436,
To find yourself in the presence
Of the artist himself, answering your knock,
Sleepily awaiting your arrival
Clad only in his boxer shorts
His corpulent frame stepping away from the doorway
To effectuate your presentation
And the shimmer of his holiness was slightly altered
In the thin gray light of the early morning,
Leaving you two souls in a hotel room
Passing through the most brief of encounters,
For we all need our breakfast.

Behold the man.

Someone must deliver; someone must pay,
Or charge it to his room.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald of Montgomery, Alabama

Daddy's little girl;
A pure Magnolia blossom
Among the debutantes
And poor little rich girls
Speaking their poor French
Among the snooty Parisians
Listening to Josephine Baker
And the early kings of jazz
Meeting Hemingway, Stein and Picasso
In smoky little dives on
The Left Bank, near the Seine.

There was no Prohibition in France.

The traffic lights sparkling red and green
Through the Springtime mist,
Colors running, fading in the evening rain shower,
Cut flowers from a cart,
Champagne cocktails at the bar
Leaving little time for letters, novels and such.

Until the dream died,
Lost in the struggle to survive
When the words didn't come as easily
And Depression fell on them all:
Hemingway to Key West, Picasso back to Spain
Only Stein stayed with her Alice
And Zelda abandoned Paris and the Jazz Age behind her
Living alone in a mountainside retreat
Among the evergreens of North Carolina,
The cool mountain air scorched her lungs,
The fire and the spark
Ending in a pile of ashes on a hillside.

Zelda

Today is the birthday of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, whose privilege and burden it was to be the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was born in Montgomery, Alabama and met Fitzgerald when he was a soldier, fresh out of Princeton. You can look at pictures of her when she was young and realize why she was Fitzgerald's Helen. She was very pretty. I think her beauty would be recognized today, even though our standards these days are somewhat different.

But she was not your typical Southern beauty queen, all beauty and flash and apple pie American ambition. I have always tried to recognize the inner beauty of the women around me and I have no doubt that Zelda's wit and intelligence caught that boy from the plains of Minnesota and anchored his heart in ways that mere physical beauty could not. Everything I have read has lead me to believe that their relationship was strong despite its self-destructive nature. She was his muse. They were the ideal of the beautiful people of their time. The Jazz Age couple.

Even Hemingway recognized the great talent that Fitzgerald had compared to the other writers of his day. And I think that Zelda had talent as well, although to a lesser degree. The Writer's Almanac had a blurb about Zelda Fitzgerald today and they quoted a letter she wrote to the parents of F. Scott Fitzgerald after he died. The writing that they quote is sublime and poetic.

It is so tragic that the couple died in the manners in which they passed. He in Hollywood, trying to make a living with his talent. She in a fire in a sanatorium in North Carolina. Perhaps the most tragic element of their deaths was the fact that they were separated at the end.