DK @ Daybreak. 4:38 to 5:32 am, June 20, 2021. 63° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
Sunday Morning
June 20, 2021 by 20 Comments
Saturday Morning
August 8, 2020 by 35 Comments
Saturday Morning
October 5, 2019 by 10 Comments
I sat on my patio, wrapped in a blanket…when I noticed that my room was not on the ground floor but on the subfloor beneath, making it closer to the edge where the beach began…I turned on the radio and Nina Simone was singing I Put a Spell on You. The seals were silent, and I could hear the waves in the distance, winter on the West Coast. I sank into bed and slept heavily.
~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)
Photo: Dream Inn Santa Cruz, CA by Angelo DeSantis
Saturday
August 4, 2018 by 10 Comments
Notes:
- Inspired by: “We walked at the edge of the sea, the dog, still young then, running ahead of us. Few people. Gulls. A flock of pelicans circled beyond the swells, then closed their wings and dropped head-long into the dazzle of light and sea. You clapped your hands; the day grew brilliant. Later we sat at a small table with wine and food that tasted of the sea. A perfect day, we said to one another…” ~ Peter Everwine, from “The Day” in Listening Long and Late (via Memory’s Landscape)
- Photographs: Françoise Dufau (France). Photo 1: L’Estuaire (The Estuary). Photo 2: La Dune Du Pilat (The Dune of Pilat). Photo 3: Au-Dessus Des Nuages (Over the Clouds)
Nirvana (-ish)
April 21, 2018 by 27 Comments
This morning. (And not Fake News, mostly.)
Sleep in till 7:45 am. Wow. Let’s do that again, and again, and again.
Read the morning papers. Read a few chapters of Patricia Hampl’s new book: The Art of the Wasted Day. And commit to workin’ on this Art today.
A heaping breakfast. Two-egg ham and cheese omelette. Bacon. Pork sausage links. Fresh cut fruit. Fresh baked pastries. And that would be plural on the pastries x 2. These same pastries were dipped in home made strawberry jam.
A short walk to the beach. Me and my breakfast hangover land heavily on the beach chair.
81º F. Partly sunny. (Feels like 92 F.) Warm winds @ 7 mph from the NE.
Miles of soft sand in both directions.
The Atlantic laps the shoreline.
Wispy clouds provide intermittent relief from the sun.
Out in the distance, hulking ocean freighters and their giant steel containers carry their cargo to ports away.
Pelicans, with their massive wing spans and beaks, cruise three feet off the ocean top, and plummet, splashing in search of breakfast. And they come again, and again and again — feeding. I look closely for a wing flap wondering how the maintain their locomotion. Can’t see it. Miracle. All of it.
Paragliders float up high, held aloft by giant multicolored rainbow parachutes. Muffled sounds of jet skis in the distance.
Families and beach goers begin to arrive. Hundreds and hundreds fill the shoreline quietly and peacefully milling, settling, reading, playing, sleeping… children pull out their plastic shovels and pails out of Mom’s beach bag and start building castles…
My toes auger into the soft sand, dark and cool a few inches down.
And, oh yea, there’s a little of something else.
Saturday Noon
March 3, 2018 by 8 Comments
the hour of twelve noon
And so you feel
your hair caught up in the sun’s fingers
holding you free in the light and the wind.
~ Yiannis Ritsos, from “Summer,” in Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses
Notes: Poem via the distance between two doors. Photo: Alexander Kozhevnikov (via see more)
Elle est bonne
August 26, 2017 by 7 Comments
On the Mediterranean beaches of France, in summer, you hear one cry repeated endlessly: Elle est bonne. That is, It’s good. Meaning the seawater. Cautious, modern inhabitants of cities thus assure one another that it’s safe to go in the water, they won’t be stunned by its arctic cold. But in its essence this cry affirms the world, nature. Elle est bonne.
~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay (April 4, 2017)
Photo: South of France via Oliver’s Travels. Related Posts: Adam Zagajewski
Saturday
June 10, 2017 by 17 Comments
the summer we’re all sharing still has a few breaths left
September 2, 2016 by 28 Comments
From behind me in the heat, beneath a cloudless sky, I hear happy shouts. Treasure every moment you are given; savor every summer’s day. From the time you are a child there is the sanguine suggestion that you will have a supply of those days stretching to the horizon and beyond. The greatest gift of summers, even as they conclude each September, is the winking promise that next year a new one will be rolling around. Waiting for you up ahead.
Labor Day weekend: Soon autumn will arrive, cool days for rekindled ambition, a time for fervent vows and ardent goals, of fresh determination that this may be the season when your ship comes in. But before that, even now, the summer we’re all sharing still has a few breaths left, each with an expiration date. To squander a single one of them would seem a shame.
~ Bob Greene, excerpt from Summer’s Greatest Gift Is That Next Year There Will Be Another
Photo Sand, wind & jazz by Fintlandia (via couvertures de sérénité)
Summer
August 14, 2016 by 22 Comments
Notes: Photograph shot by Jean-Daniel Lorieux in Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia which is known for Mediterranean beaches and whitewashed desert towns. Find more of his photos on his Facebook page. (Source: This Isn’t Happiness)
Saturday (September)
September 12, 2015 by 13 Comments
“It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason. The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore.
All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Arnold’s feet, down by the water curve.
Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas. […]
I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings.
~ Ray Bradbury, The Lake
Notes:
- Quote Source – Memory’s Landscape.
- Photo – Mme Scherzo
- Related posts: Ray Bradbury
What happened to that semi-sacred reading space during the golden months?
August 15, 2015 by 12 Comments
A few years ago, in the Boston Globe, Craig Fehrman wrote an amusing piece about the origins of the summer reading list in the late 19th century. He connected it to the rise of the American vacation. A growing middle class meant the advent of leisure time, and these developments coincided with the desire of working Americans to escape the increasingly routinized nature of their jobs.
The emphasis at that time was on light reading, on diversionary texts that would relieve the harried mind. Mr. Fehrman quotes from an article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1872 that recommended summer books which “the idler can take with him into solitude, and read with delightful pauses, when with indolent finger upon the page, his eye wanders up some green vista, or catches some view of the distant sea, and his ear is soothed with the distant murmur of the winds and waves.” In other words, if you’re too distracted to read, bring along a book that will not make you feel guilty if you never finish it. […]
And what did it matter if you never finished any of these books, if a lot of people picked up Tolstoy’s classic summer after summer and never got through the peace part to the war part? The idea of perfecting your inner life by reading the right books over the summer was as much a chimera as the idea of the perfect summer.
Still, looking forward to that spell of leisure and self-edification got you through the winter, and it consoled you with the illusion of a replenishing pause, outside the frame of mortal space and time. The Summer Book will always be with me. Even now, as my indolent finger falls upon a page of Gibbon’s masterwork on the Roman empire (summers of 1975-76, 1978-80, 2014-15, status: pending), winter’s workaday grind and piles of snow seem far, far away.
~ Lee Siegel, The End of the Ambitious Summer Reading List. For generations, Americans used the golden months to catch up on great old books and modern must reads. What happened to that semi-sacred reading space?
5:00 PM Bell
August 14, 2015 by 23 Comments
Walking on the beach
is a multi-sensory experience;
the smell of the ocean,
the feel of sand or rock under foot,
the constant roar or gentle ripple of the waves,
the taste of salt on your tongue,
and the feel of the sun or mist on your face.
Notes:
- Quote: to escape from the commonplaces of existence. Photo: Mennyfox55
- Related Posts: 5:00 PM Bell
No more. No less.
November 2, 2014 by 4 Comments
NY Times Review of Rob Pruitt’s exhibition titled: “Multiple Personalities.”
Just when you’d begun to feel you could rely on summer
September 7, 2014 by 14 Comments
Just when you’d begun to feel
You could rely on the summer,
That each morning would deliver
The same mourning dove singing
From his station on the phone pole,
The same smell of bacon frying
Somewhere in the neighborhood,
The same sun burning off
The coastal fog by noon,
When you could reward yourself
For a good morning’s work
With lunch at the same little seaside cafe
With its shaded deck and iced tea,
The day’s routine finally down
Like an old song with minor variations,
There comes that morning when the light
Tilts ever so slightly on its track,
A cool gust out of nowhere
Whirlwinds a litter of dead grass
Across the sidewalk, the swimsuits
Are piled on the sale table,
And the back of your hand,
Which you thought you knew,
Has begun to look like an old leaf.
Or the back of someone else’s hand.
—George Bilgere, “August,” The Good Kiss (Akron, 2002)
Notes: George Bilgere Bio. Poem Source – The Journey of Words. Image: Precious Things
Live & Learn 