Reflections

In Venice I photographed favorite things - gondolas, gondoliers, peeling buildings, canals of all sizes, windows full of masks or marzipan. So many pictures are really about reflection - the way water captures and extends the beauty of boats and buildings.

Tonight there's a full moon here in Seattle, turning the surface of the lake into cold wavy steel. A few flakes of snow fell this afternoon, and more may come tomorrow.

All weather looks more extreme through a window. Late this afternoon I bundled up and went out for a walk in the dry cold. Any winter day you can walk without getting wet is a plus.

Reading: Your Face Tomorrow, a trilogy by Spanish writer Javier Marias. The writing is complex, but compelling (one must admire the work of Marias' translator.) All I will say about plot is that parts of the books feel like James Bond adventures written by Henry James.

Scrapbooks

I've occasionally cut and pasted and labeled scrapbooks of trip pictures, and it can be a messy, unsatisfying job (especially the labels - even my very best printing isn't exactly quality calligraphy.)

So it's a treat to put together a digital photo album, then get back a finished product that looks like a real book! Earlier this year, I made one as celebration of 20 years of partner church history, as a gift for the minister emeritus who was responsible for our becoming a partner congregation at the very beginning of the program.

Inspired by that project, I then made a smaller book with photos from a trip two years ago, as a gift for our Dutch hosts, and took it to them this fall, when Nancy and I again visited Holland.

Later on that same trip, we helped celebrate another friend's 80th birthday, and a book seemed the perfect gift. On the night of the party, I switched off the flash on my small camera, and circulated through the party snapping away, hoping for a good candid shot of every guest.

Nancy and I put together the book soon after coming home, and last week it went off to Dordrecht. Today we got an ecstatic e-mail thank-you, more than enough reward for our effort.

Birthdays should be celebrated!

Falling back

Although I love long light summer evenings, I think Daylight Saving Time begins too soon and ends at least two weeks later than is reasonable.

"Now the afternoons will be short and dark. How can you like that?"

But mornings will be earlier and lighter (for a while.) And long dark evenings are perfect for reading.

Leaves are almost completely off the trees, thanks to yesterday's wind and rain. Sidewalks swept clean are tattooed with dark leaf shapes.

Sparky the cat watches, fascinated, crouched in "attentive hunting cat" position, as big leaves float off the maple tree. Today she dashed out the door to pounce on one that drifted onto the deck. As if it were a bird, she picked it up in her mouth and brought it inside. I think she likes the crackly sound.

One friend is headed into a tribal area somewhere near Bhopal, India. Another spent a recent evening watching stars falling over an island in the South Seas. After three trips in five months, I should be content to be home ...

Avoiding election night gloom

...and blogging to avoid returning to my NaNoWriMo project. My darling daughter-in-law, who successfully finished the draft of a novel in last year's NaNoWriMo, convinced me it's worth a try, so I'm trying to translate one of the stories I've told myself over many wakeful nights. Progress reports to follow.

(So far very little to report. Last night I managed about 710 words. A friend who had been out knocking on doors trying to get out the vote came by to decompress, just in time to rescue me from having to write Chapter 2.)

It's election night, and I am gloomy about results. Here in Washington we have a Senate race that should barely be a contest - and in polls, it's too close to call.

Speeches from early Republican winners trumpet American exceptionalism. When are we going to grow up?

This afternoon Nancy and I worked on a book of pictures from our friend Jan's 80th birthday. His party, in Dordrecht, was one of the highlights of our trip in September.

Another highlight was the sojourn in Venice. Here are some pictures.





(I love gondolas.)

In Venice, again...

This has been an extraordinary travel year for me. This time last year Nancy and I planned another Tauck cruise as a way to take my mind off upcoming surgery, and deliberately set the date for October 2010 in case I wasn't well enough by spring.

So then Leah and I went to Spain and France for 3 weeks in May, and I went to Transylvania and Austria and Paris in August, and less than six weeks after returning from THAT trip Nancy and I took off for Holland, Venice and a short cruise down the Adriatic on the 23rd of September.

After a busy week in Holland, where we visited with the people who made us so welcome in 2008, we came to Venice a couple of days early, to have time to explore before the tour takes up. I now no longer remember how many times I've been here, but Nancy had never come to Venice, and it's fun to take a first-time visitor to some of my favorite places.

It's raining a bit, but that doesn't matter. There are lots of other visitors, but that doesn't matter either, because no matter how crowded Venice gets, there is always a quiet place just down a side passage.

Tomorrow we join the group for a welcome dinner, and Sunday the land part of the cruise takes off. Meantime, we're enjoying the style & comfort & old-fashioned elegance of the Hotel Danieli (incredibly different from my usual lodgings here - fun to be somewhere really upscale at least once!)

Pictures later, perhaps. Note: the Bellini from the hotel bar is a fine drink - can't believe Harry's Bar would do it any better (and it's farther than we want to walk tonight anyway!)

Solstice

September is the breakout breakup heartbreak month, not all the time, but often enough.

Tonight Ian and I went to a vernissage - the opening of a show of watercolors by a longtime family friend. He was easy to find in the crowd of well-wishers, because he spent the evening sitting on a tall chair near the middle of the room - "Doctor's orders!"

This in no way muted his natural ebullience. Though he had trouble articulating, he lit up as each visitor came to offer congratulations on a series of small elegant pictures that eloquently capture a place he knows and loves.

He is very ill - so ill that we may not see him again. According to someone we spoke to, our friend wasn't sure he would make this date.

It's the turn of the year, an early fall that is colder and wetter than usual. Since July, two people I've known for years have died in car accidents. A member of our family is contending with a series of health problems. Listening to the news makes me alternately furious or despairing.

While waiting for a bus on the way home, I decided to focus on the almost-full moon, just then making a pale showing in the eastern sky.

The last time I saw Paris...

...it was raining even harder than in Seattle tonight. In spite of the rain, it's not particularly cold - the balcony door is open, and Sparky comes and goes.

I'm sure the rain hasn't spoiled the Storm victory parade and celebration at the Seattle Center. The team had a splendid season, topped off by winning the WNBA championship in three straight games, and their loyal, enthusiastic fans are ready to celebrate.

Sometimes September is warmer than summer here, but not this year.

A rainy month is a good time to read. Before the Seattle Public Library shut down for its late August - early September furlough (second year for a regrettable event forced on the system by budget cutbacks) I lugged home an assorted bagful. Although the books weren't all from the same section of the library, they all focused on England, something I didn't actually plan.

I like English mysteries, especially those set in familiar places. Right now I'm working through Peter Turnbull's series of police procedurals set in York.

"Arts and Letters Daily" is an excellent source of on-line articles and reviews. In an article about successful children of famous parents, I read about Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's son, who lived well into the 20th century, and had his own literary career. In search of his autobiography, published after his death by his widow, I found instead Hawthorne and His Circle, a delightful memoir Hawthorne wrote in 1903. While it focuses on his father and mother and their well-known friends, the book highlights Julian's childhood memories of these people mixed with his reflections on growing up in a charmed atmosphere.

The Hawthorne family spent seven years in England and Italy. According to Julian, Nathaniel particularly loved England, regarding it as "the ancestral home." If his life had not been cut short, four years after the family returned to America, Julian believed his father would have returned to England to live.

My first job was in a small-town library, where one of the duties was to get new books ready for the shelves. In those days, this involved putting the dust jacket into a plastic cover, pasting in a pocket for the circulation card, and embossing the library name on "the secret page" - a way to identify the book in case it met with some disaster.

SPL books now have computer chips instead of card pockets, and you can check out books without ever interacting with another human. But Julian's book is old - I was fascinated to discover that the Seattle Public Library put it into circulation on April 10, 1913 (according to a fading date stamp.) Another stamp records the date it was sent to the bindery, to reappear in familiar green hardboard. The book still has a checkout card and pocket inside the back cover - last used in 1967.

The book didn't register on the check-out pad. "It's so old that it has to be hand-checked," explained the counter clerk, who pasted a dime-size orange dot onto the book's cover to remind me to hand it to a real person when I returned it.

Here's another picture of Paris in unsettled weather, taken from the Pont de Grenelle.