Perhaps a Picnic

Parade flag. A balloon being marched down Pacific Coast Highway in front of the County Administration Center, the old WPA Civic Center, 2004.

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G: “I was good yesterday.” He also fixed my computer that wouldn't turn off. He did a System Restore to two weeks ago, and it works fine again. I had updated my Java, and new Java doesn't work with very old XP. G’ette: My scarred legs are hanging out there in shorts tho I did lower the pants past the scars for the meeting last night. Two fewer Band-Aids. Letting antiseptic and air do the work on the shallower damage. Weather: Very thick, pea soup, night and morning fogs. Warm day yesterday and today. Cawing crows seemingly everywhere hidden in the fogs. Gypsy Spirit's Cruising Adventures: Gypsy Spirit is right now at sea heading to the South Seas aboard the P&O Pacific Sun. Imagine winning a cruise. You can follow her travels on the cruise cam.

It was a puttery kind of day. Perhaps that was just what we both needed….a little of this mixed with a little of that combined with a pinch of this too for seasoning. All together, a mellow kind of day.

My friend Bee hates estate sales. She hates seeing the detritus of a life molding, torn, and left behind. Sometimes I too shrink back when I enter a home where there’s a sale and find only dead, sad things falling into dust..

Not yesterday. There’d been no death, but the home owners were older and moving far north to be with family. There home had been sold, in escrow the sign out front said, and they had begun parting with the bits of their lives. Making it better, the whole family was there smiling, happy, making this a positive day in this delightful, airy, architect designed piece of post war modernism. Comfortable simplicity, open beamed ceilings, Danish Modern furniture, blue and white goodies against the walls of glass framing the city down a canyon to the bay.

We don’t really need anything from these estate sales we attend. We have far too much stuff as it is. Perhaps they are like treasure hunts for us. Last week, at another sale, I took home a Pyrex measuring cup. I had needed a second one. Now I don’t. This week, there was much my eyes delighted in but nothing I really needed. Perhaps that set of napkins. I’d use their blue and whiteness with my own blue placemats. While G vanished far, far below into a wonderful collection of woods and tools, I browsed the bookshelves. Jan Karon, I’d not read her before. I picked up the most battered copy and browsed for a moment. Perhaps I would take this old volume. Maybe a second.

We paid and moved on out into the world again. My hair got cut by my regular lady. G revolted against the price there, and his hair got trimmed to nothing by a barber. I began reading the Karon volume while out in the car waiting.

“Can we go back and get the other two volumes by this author?” I asked waving the book around in the air.

So back to the wonderful house high on the Point we went. He vanished again into the basement workshop, and I rushed to the bookcases overjoyed to find the two volumes just waiting for me. While he rummaged in the workshop, I sat with the family in the hall.

“Can you still be a Presbyterian and not belong to the Presbytery?” One was asking another.

“You’re going to enjoy those books,” said two or three ladies all at once.

“You would never believe we were Presbyterians?” One lady leaned toward me as the genteel argument swirled.

“You’d never believe I was an Episcopalian,” I replied then had to admit that my parish was St. John’s…..that’s in far away Chula Vista if any of them knew their church community. I saved myself by saying that my mother attended the church right there, up the hill. They all nodded and smiled my way.

G saved me and took me away from my deceits, took me away with four books, the napkins and a lovely but broken picnic basket that I didn’t need at all that I will fix and cherish.

It must be time to go on a picnic by the bay.