A Little 'Bombay Suntastic' Goes Down a Treat

The flower beds around here are over-full, even unkempt, but not in a bad way. This is the season when the denizens all lay about under the sun, in various stages of finery or undress, and begin to think about dropping their seeds.

Notice the lavender flowers of the possibly rogue verbena, top left 

Our 3rd and Dayton beds are both bordered by the complementary bluish hues of a petunia and small verbena. Inside and above them, the daisies flounder, spent, having passed over the baton for white to snapdragons, now fully risen, feisty and in their prime.

Golden yarrow punctuates each bed, and the possibly rogue verbena affects a harmony now not shown in the past, rising like fireworks--tiny lavender explosions--above the faded-to-pink milfoil, and orange, shedding whatever-you-call-‘ems.

  

Salvia launches slender purple rockets at our ankles as we walk by.

Amberboa is but a memory now, the Scabiosa, almost so. And did you hear the Delphinium have all been cut down?

Suntastic!

A few azaleas, once admired as harbingers of better times, are now anonymous among a much more vibrant crowd.

The understory is also leavened by a little-seen plant whose name I just learned--Scaevola 'Bombay Suntastic'. Also known as 'Fan Flower', it is a sun-loving, easy-to-grow annual from Australia via Hawaii.

(There is a legend on the Islands that Scaevola came into being through the familiar agency of spiteful gods. To punish a young woman who angrily ripped the flower in two after a fight with her lover, the gods thereafter gave all Scaevola blossoms the fan-shaped appearance of half a flower.)

Finally, apologies to the many worthy plants for whom I do not yet have the vocabulary, and thus go nameless, but not unappreciated.

Let's give it up for all those flowers out there!

[This is the latest post I've made on a blog called "Flower Corners" in our fair town's online newspaper.] 

Getting Ready to Close

My wacky kids celebrating the final days of school, June 18, 2013--two more days until I retire.

[Warning: Contains disturbingly cynical views about teaching.]

This is my first time back here since "Opening Night" was written last September, eight months ago. This post is the other bookend of my final year as a fourth grade teacher. I reached the decision to retire this past winter, after several outbreaks of immune deficiency that manifested in weird ways, like a sty on my eyelid, and a herpes sore on my upper right lip. I was breaking down, and I figured a big part of the cause was the stress of teaching...

Yesterday was hellish--the end of a grueling 4-day-over-2-week battery of state mandated tests for student progress. So yesterday, the students were not in much of a mood for learning. Most rallied to the task, though, except for the usual battery of seven or eight 10-year old boys who pretty much just wanted to horse around. The well-behaved and studious girls were far more subtle in their loitering--quick whispered deskside visits, and notes passed underhand, many with cute little drawings on them.

This year hasn't been easy, but then none of them are. The boys had collectively been considered a handful by last year's teachers. I approached them from the point of view that although I knew they really wanted to do their best as students, they'd gotten into some bad habits...

I don't know. At least they learned to give lip service to our ideal to of paying attention, asking good questions, and doing our best. But I could never accept that, in actual fact, they often did not seem to care about learning. They were comedians or racounteurs first, impulsive, finding it hard keep seated. Nothing new in that. That's the way we boys have always behaved in school.

That's the way I behaved, and still do when I go to professional development classes.

But when I teach, I figure my job is to promote learning about one hundred percent of the time, and, by god, they better pay attention, or at least do a damn good job of pretending. And when they apply that learning, stretch and explore it, their job is to do their best--ask questions if they don't understand, and follow directions.

Even with that hard-assedness, though, my natural inclination is to keep it light, but--with the boys again, almost exclusively--once I start not being serious, the floodgates of juvenile humor and anarchy are unleashed, and are darn hard to stuff back into their unkempt boxes.

So, now, it's another 5 A.M. Friday getting ready for what I hope will be an easier day of work, what with the pull-outs for music and PE--altogether an hour break from the kids before lunch.

In the broader scheme of things, I am proud to have served as a teacher to these 10-year-olds for the past nine years, and it is time to retire, with this good feeling, and the desire to continue to teach, more on my own terms.

Opening Night

We opened.  We did good.  It ended in a love-fest party at the Taki Tiki Bar.  According to my dear wife, I have found my tribe.

Perhaps. One thing I think we all share is the slightly shameful knowledge that our hold on any particular reality is tenuous.

Summer's End...Another Birthday

We're celebrating the end of summer today, and also my birthday.  Tomorrow--Tuesday--will be the first required day back on the job--morning meetings, and we'll supposedly have the afternoon to ourselves.  Of course, there'll be a lot of confabbing since many of us haven't seen each other for eight weeks or more.  My actual birthday--Wednesday--it's all day at work and all evening in our final rehearsal before the next night's opening performance.

There was fog over the sound and low clouds above when I woke up this morning, but by brunch time they had dissipated.  Then it was the sun doing what the sun does best.  The bright beginning was undermined however, by the scores of neatly trimmed shrubs that surround our buildings picking today to be trimmed by hard-working latinos with power tools.  The noise and fumes have been incessant as these trabajadores have been crowding our windows to smoothly plane all the bristling greenery.

I'll go for a power walk later, straight down to the pier and south ten minutes along the marina to a beach at the point.  I've found a spot there in front of a sign that identifies the mountain peaks on the peninsula across the sound.  It would be a good place to shoot the shifting sequence of sunsets from solstice to solstice, beginning this December.  I need a better camera, and I've been puzzling over what kind to get.

After the power walk, back here for a light lunch and then the gym.  Before we go out for the evening, I'll go over my lines with Ki.  Then she takes me to that tiny bar everyone says is so great, and dinner at The Loft.  And then???

Settling In

We finally got all moved in to this small town just north of Seattle.  At this time last year it's not at all where I was expecting to be (do you hear the sound of mariachis?), but now, after a couple of weeks, Edmonds seems like a natural fit.  We live just a few blocks from both the cool little downtown in one direction (which means it has a blues club, tiki bar, several coffee shops and good restaurants, and a gym), and the beach with its marina and fishing pier, in the other.

Our sunny garden apartment even has a peek-a-boo view of Puget Sound and the islands and mountains beyond.  About once an hour we hear the ferry blow its deep horn, or the Amtrak blast its warning as it rattles up and down the coastline.  This reminds us that while there may be only languid strollers up town, down by the water people are moving with purpose.

There's good variety in the dozen people living in these apartments, in two low wings facing each other with a lumpy patch of browning grass, and vain attempts at beautiful shrubbery, in between.  Adrienne--a nervous and friendly Chinese American lady--is the "manager," driving up from Seattle Saturday mornings to puzzle strenuously over the plantings, and pass along earnest messages about us all being a family.

This place not only had everything we were looking for, but it was also the first place we looked at.  And talk about the stars being aligned:  Minutes after we rented the apartment, a block away I noticed the rehearsal annex for the Driftwood Players.  My audition a week later was successful, and I landed a small part in a play we're doing in September.  I'd always had it in the back of my mind that when I retired to a place such as this, I'd become attached to its community theater, and here it was!


K will be volunteering at the senior center here; beginning next month she will also be feeding the poor and homeless, both in Edmonds and Seattle. For trips into the city, it's a quick, cheap ride on the commuter train that stops nearby.

I've become a walking-fiend, exploring the folded and platted landscape as if driven by some colonizing force, all the time mumbling or declaiming my lines in a Scottish accent.  And every day, late afternoon, K and I walk down to the beach, sit next to the pier and bask in an expanse of views over the water.

One joy of living here comes from the outstanding flower beds tucked around the street corners in our old town center.  Hanging pots overflowing with flowers are everywhere, as are comfortable iron benches, and views down to the water.  More than once, the past few weeks, words like "blessing," and "paradise" have passed between us.