Neighborhood Walk

Boz and I took a slow meander early yesterday evening. We met four delightful children on the next block, all of whom wanted to meet and pet Boz.

"Remember what I told you," said their grandmother. "Approach slowly."

"What's his name?"

"Does he have teeth?

"Does he bite?"

"What happened to his tail?"

"What's a 'rescue dog?' Does he rescue people?"

"How old is he?"

I answered their questions and they petted Boz with gentle persistence until he could no longer endure their attention. He pulled at the leash and rolled his eyes at me, letting me know he was ready to move on.

Half a block down we were privy to another conversation between a mother and her kids. This time, we stayed out of it.

"Get outta my car!"

(Something breaks.)

"What are you doing, just sitting there, being stupid? I said get outta my car! Get out!"

(Tears.)

"Stupid. Get in the house."

(Tears.)

Life is charmed. Life is vicious. It's love and it's fear. It's accidental, serendipitous and deliberate. It's true and it's a big, fat lie. It's a million things at the same time, funny and sweet and tragic.

After dinner, Boz did everything he could to get us to sit in the living room with him so he could chew his bone. He doesn't like to chew alone. He wants company. I had things to do first: help John with the dishes, sort the laundry, upload a photo. Through it all Boz was most impatient. We finally sat down together in the living room--me with my laptop and Boz with his bone--and life was good.

Guest Author: Kay Mouradian and A Gift in the Sunlight

Long-time visitors may remember my brief profile of Kay Mouradian in May of 2010. Besides her current novel she has also written books on yoga and meditation. (Wow! I want the brand new copy!) Please welcome today's Guest Author, Kay Mouradian.

 

I wish I had known more about my mother Flora. She was 18 when she came to America in 1920 to marry my father, a man she knew only from a photograph. Becoming an orphan after losing her family in the Armenian genocide, my mother took a chance that the man in the picture would take care of her and I am a witness to say that he did.
        
When I was a kid growing up in Boston, Mom would tell me stories about her tragic life in Turkey, but those stories went in one ear and out the other. I was too busy trying to be an American kid, like my Irish and Italian friends, so I never really knew what happened to my mother during World War I. All that changed when she nearly died at the age of 83. That’s when I started to read about Ottoman Turkey during the Great War and became overwhelmed with the depth of cruelty inflicted on the Turkish Armenians in 1915. I then learned how that catastrophe had broken my mother’s heart and changed her life forever and I knew her story needed to be told.

There is a saying in the literary community that if you want to know the facts read a newspaper, but if you want to know the truth, read a novel. That statement reverberated in my mind and I decided to tell my mother’s story in a novel. Since most of my writing had been in academia, I spent months scouring through books in the 808.3 section of my South Pasadena library learning about plot and character development, foreshadowing, and point of view. The actual writing was far more difficult, but I had a wonderful critique group who kept me honest.

I’ve often heard writers say that the best part of writing is the research and I also found that to be true. I went into used bookstores canvassing the history and memoir sections. After reading through the table of contents I bought and read every book that said "Constantinople." I went through the book stacks at UCLA and became mesmerized with the "Turkey in World War I" section. Then I read through 10 reels of microfilm from the Library of Congress of dispatches and letters from the U S Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire covering the years from 1913-16 and spent a week at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt library reading the personal papers of the Ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, Sr.

My mother’s story, A Gift in the Sunlight, is now in its second edition and can be purchased through Amazon, Vromans, and my website, agiftinthesunlight.com.

I AM MY MOTHER’S VOICE and her story is being made into a documentary...an Armenian Ann Frank story!

I Needed That

Lately Boz and I have been walking at dusk when it's cooler. The cicadas, frogs and crickets send up a racket. Behind every bush there's something to interest Boz, even if it's only a scent.

There's something to interest me, too, around every corner. A light, a shadow, a new view.

Yesterday was one of those days when nothing went right. Except this.

Zen Monday: #162

If this is Monday, it must be Zen.

In Zen, you learn through experience rather than books or lectures. Zen Monday is the day you experience the photo and tell us what you've learned, rather than me lecturing you about it.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments box and enjoy.

Ten Years Later

Ten years later America is a nation divided, divisive. If we can afford air travel we must suffer long lines of indignities only to sit cramped in airless pens. Our journalism has become corporate pandering instead of actual information. Our economy is this thing we stumble through, some of us falling. We are dispirited.

It's not like the Muslim world has it any better. Think of the struggles for Democracy in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan. Think what Lybian and Syrian citizens are enduring this very moment.

So. Are you a pessimist or an optimist? Did Al Quaeda win or can we turn this thing around?

Maybe it doesn't sound like it, but I'm an optimist.

Meeting each other teaches us about each other. It's a lot harder to fear or hate someone you've shared conversation with over a cup of coffee.

If we can't afford to travel to the Arab world, (or if we're afraid to get on a plane), we can meet our Arab neighbors right here in southern California, starting with the annual Arab American Festival in Garden Grove, September 23-25th. It's free (so the economy is no excuse) and it looks like fun.

Or just...break bread with someone who is different from you.

Here is the best writing I've seen about 9/11, from Roberta Martinez.

We Make Movies, LA

The other night John and I went to a screening at a cool venue in downtown Los Angeles. We saw a feature, a short film and a handful of trailers, all presented by a collective called We Make Movies.

Impressed. Involved. Proud. These were the things I felt while watching--you know, as opposed to This is too loud. I wish those people in the next row would shut up. I have to pee.

Impressed: the feature, Ruby Booby, was made for somewhere around $7,000 and was more engaging than a number of $70 million behemoths I've seen lumbering across the screen. There was some fine acting, too, and if I were a casting director I'd be on the phone trying to book these people right now.

Involved: the short, Carefully Descending, takes you to the heights and depths of love with a story so piercing, sad and beautiful that I'm still hearing the superb music days later, and the casting director in me is still on the phone.

In fact I'd like to manage the careers of all the writers, directors, cinematographers, producers, etc. whose work I saw at the screening. Even the trailers made me want to see the films they teased, which is exactly what trailers are supposed to do.

This We Make Movies group -- watch for them. Unless, of course, you're the kind of person who sits through an indie film thinking, There should be more blood/sex/blood. Where are the explosions? They should be more abusive to the women.

Oh yeah.
Proud: my husband's a member.


Uppity Uppity Update:
There will be a free screening of Ruby Booby Tuesday, October 18th for cast, crew and industry folk (and readers of Pasadena Daily Photo!). The screening will be held at the Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main Street Los Angeles, CA 90012, (213) 617-1033. Doors open at 6:30pm, the screening begins at 7:00 and Ruby Booby starts at 7:30.

RSVP to rubyboobythemovie (at) gmail (dot) com to assure yourself a seat.

The Particulars

Who: would be so negligent as to lose their library card? Uh, that would be me.

What: This is the dome of Pasadena's City Hall reflected in a window of the Central Library.

When: During the month of September, you can renew a lost library card for free. Usually it's $10.

Where: 285 E. Walnut St, Pasadena.

Why: Because I like it. Not the library card. I mean yes, I like the library card (or I will when I get it). But the picture. I like the picture. And the library. City Hall, too.

Urban Meets Wild

Not a complicated photo. (This one loaded really fast, that's how I know.) It's one last shot to complete the story about our evening at Hahamongna Watershed Park (see the previous two posts). You should probably click on it to enlarge it. Or at least I wish you would, otherwise it's just a little splash of gold in the black.

Looking north from the Devil's Gate Dam you see the Jet Propulsion Lab, affectionately known as JPL, with the lights of La Canada Flintridge off to the left and a couple of Altadena's gleams on the right.

JPL anchors the north end of the park and the Dam, where we're standing, marks the south end. In between are coyotes, dirt, rabbits and trees--wildlife doing its thing. There are also water catch basins, telephone poles and paved roads. It's not wilderness. It's a symbiosis of humans and the wild, and it's working pretty well for the nonce.

If you care about protecting Hahamongna and places like it you might check out the Urbanwild Network. They're having a potluck at the Eaton Canyon Nature Center Saturday, September 10th. Gather at 5:30pm, dinner at 6, program at 7.

Even Better

If you've been on Facebook with a Pasadena friend in the last couple of days you know we were treated to a magnificent sunset Sunday night. Everyone posted photos of it.

John, Bellis and I walked Hahamongna with our friends Karen and David and our various dogs. The sky changed and changed and changed again, and we couldn't stop taking pictures. The dogs didn't notice the sky, but they may have been aware of our stopping to say "ooh" and "ah," like at a fireworks celebration.

A spectacular sunset is spectacular no matter where you see it from, and the visuals rivaled what the gods must have viewed from Mount Olympus. But when you're walking with friends on a dusty trail and the lightning begins to strike while coyotes yip, and the air is a sweater woven of the scent of buckthorn, not even perfection compares.

Not the Last Day, After All

Word has it that the Devil's Gate Dam interim silt removal project is complete. If so, all the silt has been moved to Johnson Field from the dam. For now.

It's not the whole project by a long shot. There will be an environmental impact report before the rest of the work is done. I don't know how long that'll take or what the end result will look like, but it will be a much larger project.

Here's how Johnson Field looked last Saturday at dusk. Not nearly as bad as I'd feared. I took the photo from my usual spot, so those of you familiar with PDP's Last Day Project could make comparisons even if you've never seen Johnson Field in person.

A pan to the left:

It's a bit dark, but I hope you can see in both photos that the trees have been spared. Basically, the county workers piled the silt neatly at the north end of the sunken basin that is Johnson Field. The silt took up about half the space. Room for more silt in the future, I guess.

I have a list of disappointments related to this work, but those disappointments are (mostly) not with LA County. There's plenty of time for it to get worse but so far, the work they've done has been more sensitive than I expected. We even saw a few toads at the fountain. With a little rain we'll soon have some nice weeds growing in the silt. Maybe wildflowers.

We were treated to spectacular skies that night. More pictures to come.

Zen Monday: #161

Today's a holiday, but Zen Monday isn't taking the day off.

In Zen, one learns through experience rather than books or lectures. Zen Monday is the day you experience the photo and tells us what you've learned, rather than me lecturing you about it.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments box and enjoy.

The Best Laid Pipes

Boz and I had planned to hike yesterday. We were going to head to Johnson Field, where this pipe stands. Or stood. We're not sure. A lot's been going on at Johnson Field lately, and for all we know this above-ground access to water has been buried under the mounds of silt being moved from behind Devil's Gate Dam to what we hope is temporary storage in Johnson Field.

But we didn't find out for sure last night, as we had to postpone our hike. We'll find out later today, though, and bring you a report.

Fun news for the meantime: the September issue of Pasadena Magazine features the Dena's daily photo bloggers. For her article, "Daily Affirmations," Kelly Shimabukuro interviewed me, Laurie Allee (Glimpses of South Pasadena), Kat Likkel (Pasadena, 91105 and Beyond) and our already sorely missed Ben Wideman (The Sky is Big in Pasadena and wherever else he goes). Thank you, Kelly!

It was Ben who turned me on to our newest daily photo blogger. She's a bit anonymous, but she's got style. Check out All Over Pasadena.

Noble Beast

photo by John Sandel

The noble beast, the pompetus of love, the elder statesman of his radius, has been suffering neighborhood walks for an entire month. A month! Walking on cement! With his delicate toes!

I remind him that some dogs don't get a daily walk, but he's spoiled. He remembers hikes in the mountains. When do we get to go back to the wild? he wants to know. When do we get to smell coyotes again? Not that he wants to meet them in person.

Boz doesn't know it yet, but today we get back on the trail. He has new flea meds, a special water bottle and desire enough to carry him far past where we're going, no matter how delicate his toes.

But you can't tell a dog these things until the last second or they'll follow you at your heels, gazing at you desperately until the moment the leash jangles and the car door opens. So I haven't told him yet. Right now, the fava bean of farts is snoring.

Ubiquitous Utilities

At first I didn't see pipes like these.

Then I noticed one. It stuck out above ground. Someone had painted it a bright color.

Then I saw them everywhere. I mean, they are everywhere. All different colors and sizes and shapes.

I exagerrate. They're not everywhere. I don't have one at my house, for example. But I'm thinking of getting one.

Theme Day: Perspective

Today's theme at City Daily Photo is "perspective." That can be a technique used in art and architecture to show distance or elevation. It can also be how you look at things. For instance, this could be a hole in a hedge, through which you view a field of small avocado trees being watered by a sprinkler. Or it could be a window into the past, to the days before Henry Huntington bought his land in San Marino and this was merely a farm.

City Daily Photo is now 1412 blogs strong, the most recent being Denpasar, Indonesia. To see how other blogs around the world have depicted the theme, click here to view thumbnails for today's participants.

Guest Author: Linda Dove and "O Dear Deer,"

Linda Dove is that rare creature: a published poet. Besides her acclaimed books she has published poems in the L.A. Review, The Antigonish Review, Clackamas Literary Review and more, and has won several poetry awards. Please welcome today's guest author, Linda Dove.

I’ve encountered a few unexpected moments on the way to becoming a writer. After I published my first book of poems in 2009, I was surprised with the sense that I needed to take on a new voice, a new technique. Most folks would tell you to stick with what’s worked, or—more insistently—that you should keep to what you know, that you should write out of your authentic place. “Authentic” is a much-bandied-about word in writer circles, but I’m not sure anyone really knows what they mean by it. In any case, I felt like I wanted to try the sort of experimental writing that made my heart race when it was done well. I admired it because I didn’t understand it.   

So I did a lot of reading. For two years, I read everything I could get my hands on both in print and online—poetry collections, chapbooks, journals, anthologies, criticism, book reviews, theory. I followed poets on Twitter, 20 years my junior, who were starting innovative presses and e-zines. I not only read blogs, I read the comment sections of blogs, where the meatiest—some would say the nastiest—debates were happening. I once found myself sitting alone at a table in a decrepit Denver ballroom, which was sagging with Christmas lights though it was April, as I sipped red wine and waited for a packed house of Hot Young Poet Things—those who had never known a world without the internet—to present their work. If you perceive some anxiety about my age coming into play, you wouldn’t be wrong. I knew no one and was sporting the only gray hair in the room. At least I had an iphone to look busy with. 

In the midst of this re-education project, I got called for jury duty in downtown L.A. Surprise! I was launched into an alternate universe, full of odd-sounding legalisms and morgue photos and testimony about gang tattoos. My jury experience became the basis for my chapbook of experimental poems, O Dear Deer,, although I hadn’t planned on writing about the trial, which seemed too raw, too complex.  Wasn’t it wrong—sort of unholy—to experiment with so much grief? But I realized that, the more fragmented the lines, the more they spoke to human brokenness. I didn’t try to recount the events that led to the trial in my poems. Instead, I became fixated on deer, antlers, trees. Where clarity would have collapsed under the weight of its own detail, abstraction made room for what was truly authentic: the fact that nothing would ever be the same. 

My books are available at Amazon and, locally, at Webster’sFine Stationers. Please join me at two upcoming readings, where I’ll be introducing the poems from O Dear Deer, : 

Two Heads are Better Productions Presents the Kulture FaCtory’s Sundays at Ellouise, 55 Waverly Drive, Pasadena, Sunday, September 18th at 4:00 PM, $5 cover charge. This appearance is a “10 for 10” reading, which means you’ll get to hear 10 of us read for 10 minutes apiece—short but wide and sweet. It also happens to fall on my birthday! 

Webster’s FineStationers, 2450 N. Lake Ave., Altadena, Saturday, October 15th at 6:00 PM. This reading is happening in conjunction with one of Webster’s regular wine pairing events, "Latin Wines for a Passionate Evening," which will be held from 4:00 to 6:00 PM, so that’s added incentive to come out and have some vino with your verses. They'll keep pouring wines through the poetry reading, and there'll be food, too!

Burnt

Growing up in Illinois there were days when it was so cold you couldn't go outside, or if you did, you bundled up in extra socks and waterproof boots. You added layers under your hooded parka, a scarf around your face to protect your nose and eyes. Then came mittens--not gloves--because you needed your fingers to generate heat and keep each other warm.

In the southwest we have days when you shouldn't go outside, but they're at the opposite end of the thermometer. You don't bundle up for such weather but if you must be out for a while you do cover up: you need a brim on that hat, plus sunglasses to protect your vision, long sleeves and preferably long pants to preserve your skin, and sunscreen on the remaining exposed dermal inches.

Our temps came back into the 90s yesterday, down from over 100 degrees, and it felt like relief. It got so hot this time I could go outdoors without a sweater even at night. (Now that I love.) We'll be back to the high 80s by Wednesday--in other words, back to normal.

This camellia will survive. But it's a good argument for sunscreen.

Zen Monday: #160

In Zen, one learns through experience rather than books or lectures. Zen Monday is the day you experience the photo and tells us what you've learned, rather than me lecturing you about it.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good book. It's just that Monday is the day you write it.

LA, Gloaming

John and I are not the party animals we once were, but we've been going out in the evenings quite a bit lately. It's kind of a big deal because we don't ordinarily step out much out after dark.

(This is not dark, I know that, it hasn't been that long. It's not even dusk. It's the gloaming.)

See the orange glow on the horizon? That's anticipation.

How was your weekend? What's on the horizon for you this week?

Haunting the Library

If my mother were alive, today would be her 90th birthday. She and my father taught me and my siblings to love books. It worked: I'm a writer, like Mother was. One of my sisters is a librarian. My brother is a book seller. My one sister who isn't in the book business has a Ph.D, like my dad did. We all seem to be partial to book learnin'.

I went to the library yesterday to research a new book. It was about 100 degrees out. On hot days people come in, find a book and a comfy chair and snooze in the air conditioning. Added to that, "the collection is being rearranged," or words to that effect, adding to the busy feeling at the library. I don't know if the new fourth floor teen center (pictured here in its larval phase) is a cause or an effect of the rearrangement. I found a quiet bench on the fourth floor near the construction area and read for a while.

After I checked out my books I stopped at the Friends of the Library book store to see if I could snag a bargain. A woman there was buying almost all of the children's books. She reminded me of someone who would be very old today if she were still here. But she'd have no trouble finding her way around a busy library.