April 19, 2009

Dancing in the Park




A Quinceanera couple dancing in the park to a fiddler’s sweet notes. 2009.



Himself: Architecture, Lunch, Auto Museum, got a hair cut that works for the moment, dinner at the Athenian with desert.

Herself: I joined the Photographic arts museum.

Reading: Spandau by Speer, still.

Balance: Sitting on the grass watching a fiddler play and kids dance.

We met Beth and her mom, Helen, in the park, and we walked for only a few hours getting pictures for her list. Perhaps we did about half. It’s an ambitious list, and I am sure that it’s a major part of her grade in her Art History class this semester. One of those projects due at the end of the semester sort of thing.



I had eleven pages of numbered sites with photographs, hugs, and smiles squeezed in between. The sun was out, and we dodged mental health runners, a parade of dog walkers, and event companies that were filling most of Balboa Park’s few parking spaces with tents. Sunday, today, is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day being celebrated in Balboa Park by all comers. I thought it a crazy idea that first Earth Day. Today I think it a very important part of life.



She once told me I was easily amused when I told her about the Carytids holding up a roof for the earliest California Exposition. Once she had seen them, she laughed with me. After acres of pictures and a saunter back past the cars to find a mullion here and a continuous frieze there, they left to take her mother, the other grandmother, to lunch, and we moved the car to a parking place left open right in front of G’s museum. Imagine.



Lunch, with discount at the Hall of Champions, then while he worked I walked, enjoyed, smiled in the sun, looked at other’s photographs, photographed other’s, and felt very old trying to get up from the grass. I actually asked myself when I had gotten this old. Not good.



A Quinceanera walking past…dancing past, the party in red and black. A wedding here another there, this one watching a magician…all followed by photographers and assistants with mountains of the paraphernalia needed for the photographic ceremonies.



Here the wail of a well played sax. Magic around every corner accompanied by the clanking of tent poles and hum of diesels setting up for the morrow.

3 comments:

  1. Was the comment about you being easy to amuse meant as a compliment? I remember someone telling me that the dinner I had prepared was very "modern". Needless to say, I recognized this as a futile attempt at finding anything nice to say about the food I'd prepared. Thankfully, I burst out laughing and saved the moment.

    Haven't been commenting on your blog as regularly in the last while. Still reading your posts with much interest, but life is unfortunately too busy. Hopefully, things will slow down soon.

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  2. Life will never slow down, dear Lia. Just enjoy.

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  3. Love your tour of Balboa Park. I was there, years ago, it still looks much the same.

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