Yellow Petals and A Magic Lantern Show
As I rode my bike through the canyon yesterday, I noticed that a cheery strip of yellow flowers had appeared by the creek like a ribbon dropped while dancing. I hadn’t seen these before and I found them charming. Turns out they are Bermuda buttercups, non-native perennials originally from South Africa, and how they ended up here in Sacate Canyon is a mystery, but apparently they have found their way all over California. I learned, too, that they contain high levels of oxalic acid, and had it occurred to me to taste them, I would have discovered that they are sour. One website described them as being among the most troublesome and invasive of weeds. Still, they were lovely.
And that’s the sort of thing that passes for weekend news around here.
We had a visitor, also, a young friend named Skyler, one of Mike and Donna’s kids, now a student at UCSB. Skyler wore red shoes, and I liked that about him. He also feigned interest in watching a slide show -- or maybe it was not feigned but sincere, which would be even more remarkable. Either way, I was touched. It had been years since anyone encouraged me to bring up that old projector and the trays and notebooks crammed with slides.
And so we set things up, turned out the lights, and there, in living color, on a blank white wall and bigger than life, we saw ourselves and our good friends -- young again, and comically robust, and seldom apart from our bicycles. There were Mike and Donna, and Steve, and Skip, and Chris, and Jim and Teresa and Richard and Corinne, and Jeff and Margaret too, just to name a few key players, and of course the small adorable versions of children now grown-up and faraway. I saw us again ascending the White Mountains past the bristlecone pines, and setting up camps at Tuttle Creek and Anza Borrego, and exploring the backcountry of San Diego County. There were images of us riding in Baja, at Brian Head, along the White Rim Trail, and out at the isthmus of Catalina Island. The room filled with big blue skies, red rock and aspen trees, grassy meadows and sandy dirt roads.
There were local adventures, too, as we cruised along the deserted paths of El Morro, or gathered in the alley behind our old apartment in Corona del Mar after a ride, or pedaled through enchanting places in Newport and Laguna that have since been decimated and covered over with large aggressive Orange County houses.
There were even slides from right here at the Ranch, a place whose essence has thankfully survived. We had only a modular home on our parcel back then, and the macadamia trees were tiny saplings and not yet bearing nuts, and although we had no telephone or television, we didn't miss them at all because at night there were puppet shows, and Leg-O villages to construct, and stories to be read.
Ah, the memories.
As Monte and I reflected afterwards, it isn’t that we don’t know how old we are now, it’s that we didn’t realize how young we were then.
And it was so much fun to glimpse it all again in the form of a magic lantern show with someone from the next generation willingly present.
I respect Skyler for wondering about his parents' lives before he came upon the scene, for appreciating the adventures we had, even for noticing what cool bikes we rode.
I thank him for finding us relevant and for considering the possibility that our histories might hold interest.
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And I've discovered I am fond of concrete images, let analysis be damned. No sense brooding on all that time takes away, better just to marvel at how wonderful it is. Give me tangible details, the colors and light, the bright slide show pictures of whatever we were flashed upon a screen, or the spate of buttercups along a creek where it smells of grass and mud.
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Somehow this seems a good moment to insert these words by the poet Robert Hass:
If there is a way in, it may be
Through the corolla of the cinquefoil
With its pale yellow petals,
In the mixed smell of dust and water
at trailside in the middle reaches of July.
Soft: an almost phospher gleam in twilight.