Mornings are getting crisper, fresher. The other evening I took myself out to dinner. I needed a gift certificate for my retiring eye doctor. We said goodbye at my last appointment this week. He has been putting plugs resembling fine fishing line in my tear ducts to prevent dry eyes for the last several years of our twenty year relationship. I will miss him and his staff who will also be leaving the office as it is taken over. I ordered a drink called the “Sandy”. It was nice and lemony.
Followed by shrimp and scallops.
The sun has moved just enough lower in the sky to give a lovely light through drying dogwood leaves and grasses.
I have been working on an essay about museum shops and the things that we buy from them for so many reasons. But mainly because you know that you will never see them again. It is your one chance ever to own this small thing that will so easily fit in your suitcase to bring home. And how the best section of those shops is the children’s area where things are scaled down in size and meant to be fun. The children’s books can be interesting here as well. That is if they have illustrations that are not that god awful flat big-eyed commercial drawings that look like they could fit into any story by just changing the little girl’s hair from a pony tail to pig tails. The over-sized kids are racing around frantically as the reader chases them from page to page. Anyway, avoid buying these mass-produced ideas of what children’s illustrators are striving for today. They are dreadful and all look copied from the same book that some publisher has told them will most certainly sell.
Instead, find the books illustrated by a person who can not only draw, but bring words to life with the careful mastery of a practiced hand. Maurice Sendak, Jill Barklem, Tasha Tudor, to name a few. Almost any book illustrated in England seems a much better idea than US illustrators. Our standards seem to have slipped in all aspects of what we used to take pride in. From our politics to our health to our cheap mass productions made for marketing, we are often not even a sad imitation of what we were not so many years ago.
Anyway, buy the books that make you want to save them just to pause over pages of finely done drawings.
I am going to do a bit of baking later today. Spinach phyllo triangles for the freezer seems a good idea. I am toying with the idea of buying a new saucier pan. Maybe even add a one quart stainless pan for boiling up eggs and melting butter. My old pans have hot spots burned into them from my gas stove. It could be just me, but one wonders if there is a cutoff year for old ladies to stop buying pots and pans, and just make do with whatever is there. I will give myself another week and maybe by then will forget I ever thought it was necessary.
Next week I am going to write a cautionary tale about hanging onto things that make you wish you hadn’t…and do you call for another backhoe or bonfire to give a proper sendoff. In the meantime, each of them is worth writing down the story of how it came to be part of a collection that needed to be cherished forever….before it became burdensome. Our “forevers” are a bit short-lived as we age.
Anyway, out to the kitchen to see if the phyllo has thawed.
Til later…