meet me at the totes

Our lady of the green staircase surprised me Sunday by inviting me to go to see Dylan with her. The best part was talking pretty much through the whole thing because I couldn't hear his words, only the music, which all sounds pretty much the same to my unseasoned ear. I heard amazing stories from her, though, one about a boy snatched from his mother in Rome by fascists, one about ghosts she saw at the coliseum, one about Pete Hamill, a writer from these parts, and a very sad one about Darin Strauss, someone who I'd always noticed seemed so charmingly pleased with everything while walking down the street, but I found out I might be wrong. Who knows, maybe he's come to terms with the manner in which, when he was so young and tender hearted, provenance called upon him to play the angel of death. It hurt him, it freed her. When he faced off with beauty's terrible ferocity it must have exploded his heart to every corner of the earth. How astonishing that the man held up and now feeds us angles of experience that can wear down our hardest shells.

Green staircase opened a lot of windows for me that day. The view of Rome expanded when I found a book by Michael Sheridan on 17th St yesterday, Romans, Their Lives and Times, a small volume I might actually find the time to read a few random pages of. Our city is filled with innumerable windows and doors that open and close like the panels on an advent calender, and I never know what beauty will emerge. Maybe a partridge in a pear tree, 5 golden rings...

Do you like the photo of White's column, which Pete Hamill and his friends called the totes, short for totem poles? That's not a Grecian Urn on the top, it's a bronze model of a cauldron used long ago by the Pythias of Delphi to contain stones thought to hold the essence of Dionysis' bones. But Tuesday evening, the oracle was looking very Ashcan to me.

blue around greenwood

the green staircase

Beautiful isn't it? That's the staircase in my friend's 15th St. 12.5 foot-wide row house. She lives there with her husband and their 4 children, and their house is one of the coziest most inviting places I've ever been. One day she tolerated me combing through it with my camera, shooting one still life after another, as if I could fill myself up with the warmth and character I find in her house, warmth and character and beauty that belong to her.

I can count on one hand people who have simply blown me away with their kindness and sensitivity. They are few and far between, like my fingers. I'm sure she wishes she could turn it off sometimes, she's so tuned in to some wavelengths of support and appreciation that I can't even hear with my mere mortal ears. It takes quite a lot to get on her bad side. She's cheerful and upbeat long after I would have lost my composure. That's because, all in all, she's well composed.

The green staircase reminds me of knowing people like her, whose depth of tenderness causes some sleeping thing in my heart to reawaken. The green of the wall is the healing power of love, how it causes things to grow, how it covers this world's struggling beings with protection and warmth and support as necessary as the rain is to plants. The white steps lead somewhere beyond my powers of imagination, to a level of purity, peace, resolution and beauty unrecognizable to our worldly eyes. Heaven I guess. This is a climb I whole-heartedly want to make, which I've been attempting with great awkwardness all my life but with slightly more success over the last year. It's not my fault I've been such a pill, we all absorb poisons and beliefs that we then spew onto others in the form of competitiveness, elitism, aggression, greed, desperation, arrogance, fear...

So nice to be reminded that there's another way. Here's a handful of bitch coupons, Lalaleeloo, for your birthday, to redeem at your leisure on my time. So I can feel a little better about myself.

Happy Birthday!

Green Laundry

My best efforts to green up the laundry, which include making my own laundry soap and buying somewhat expensive mirco fiber "quick dry" towels which I can line dry, were heading me in the right direction. I was also considering enforcing a no-clothes-on-weekends policy but no one would ever forgive me for that.

I never considered adding a green crayon to the laundry, which is what happened this week, when a little chunk was hidden away in one of the kids' pockets. So the laundry came out far greener than anticpated, if a little uneven.