One of the highlights of our recent trip to the Pacific Northwest was the day we spent at Butchart Gardens near the small city of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Reading about this attraction did not prepare me for its beauty and intensity and I took hundreds of pictures, but I still had time to watch people viewing the plants and flowers. I was too inhibited (or polite?) to approach any of these intriguing people to have a conversation, so what I am writing here is either conjecture or something I overheard. The women pictured here were dressed in similar but not identical outfits, pale tan or grey and loose-fitting. They laughed and posed for one member of their group after another. Something about them made me imagine that they were members of a religious community on a holiday. A less enthusiastic pair of visitors pictured here reminded me of the bored but accommodating husbands you often see in a mall, sitting on a bench while their wives shop. In this case they had actually paid for the privilege, but they might have been thinking that one flower is pretty much like every other—and at this site there were probably hundreds of thousands of them. A group of at least a dozen young Mennonite women walking with an older man and woman attracted a lot of attention. I was drawn to the pink Crocs and digital cameras which somehow seemed inconsistent with the plain or spartan lifestyle I usually associate with their beliefs. I couldn’t help thinking that at $25 each, they had paid a whopping sum at the ticket gate. Still, the gardens themselves were what enthralled me, and I’ll be writing about them and putting up a gallery of plants soon.

Even when we live through a piece of history, we may remember only the narrow part we experienced. Autumn 2006 is the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. I would have to go to a book or the Internet to reconstruct the details of the Warsaw Pact, the role of students in the uprising, the reaction of the Soviet Union, the numbers of refugees who escaped to the West, or the brain drain which enriched welcoming countries such as the United States. What I remember is that Hungarian refugees disembarked at the Summit, New Jersey train station in my childhood hometown. A close friend of my mother’s, Helen Sawyer, had enlisted my sister and me in a project to cut pictures out of magazines that could be pasted into scrapbooks and labeled for children and adults, most of whom would need an English vocabulary primer. I think I recall being at the train station one day when these scrapbooks were handed to families, or perhaps I have just imagined that event. For an account of one family’s experience, see this recent newspaper article. It is said that when we reach a certain age, we begin to reflect in earnest on our early experiences, take stock of our lives, and resolve to use the rest of our time accordingly. I have been thinking recently about how individuals, by small actions, weave the fabric of our collective lives, as Helen Sawyer and countless others must have done at that specific time in history. Perhaps nothing is insignificant.

Eric got tickets for an evening at the circus, an outing for Felix, Grandma, and Grandpa. Before showtime, they had an hour of up-close-and-personal on the floor with the clowns, jugglers, and elephants which was a good way for Felix to get acclimated. We were a little taken aback when he sat immobile and expressionless in his seat the whole time, but we were even more surprised the next day when he gave his father an animated blow-by-blow description of the entire evening. Grandpa was most impressed by the seven motorcyclists whipping around inside a wire globe, Grandma was charmed by the elephants, but Felix’s favorite was the clowns’ food fight! He was also impressed with Hercules the Strongman who could pull an elephant on a cart, catch a cannonball, and bear the weight of a car driven over his chest. Every day he wants to read his souvenir circus program and relive the excitement.

Freshly diapered, sippy-cup in hand, Coco toddles to the television and waits for permission to press the Play button. The default L-O-A-D-I-N-G sequence elicits a shiver of delight, the FBI warning screen is accompanied by a chortle, and the magic wandful of Walt Disney fairy dust triggers a dance of anticipation. She drops to the floor, swaying rhythmically as Baby Noah begins. Daddy showers in the first floor bathroom, Mommy checks today’s client schedule at the computer, Felix catches a few final dream moments upstairs, but Coco is mesmerized by the classical music, gentle voiceover, and alternating National Geographic style nature footage and engaging wind-up toys of this new installment in the Baby Einstein video line-up. At 14 months, she is already well acquainted not just with the usual menagerie of nurturing elephants, graceful giraffes, and comical penguins, but with wombats, dolphins, and caribou (“Let’s visit the polar regions!”). Grandma tries without success to seduce her with library videos—the sweet Is Your Mama a Llama?, the bouncy Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!--but it is Baby Noah that has captured her early-morning heart and mind. For the rest of the day she will play contentedly and read her books, ignoring the television until tomorrow dawns.

I love to figure out how to do new things or follow the directions/recipe to make something. It doesn’t help that you can find instructions for just about anything on the Internet! Here’s an animation for Halloween. I took an image of a jack-o-lantern, kept darkening the illuminated parts, the background, and the pumpkin itself, and placed each new version on its own layer in Photoshop. Then I made the animated gif in Image Ready, a part of Photoshop. As I was working on the project (simple in concept but with numerous opportunities for mistakes, all of which I made at least once), I kept thinking about the early 80’s when I embarked on the adventure of learning to use the computer language called Basic on my Atari 800. I’m still having fun doing things that serve no earthly purpose. (Click on the pumpkin to start the animation.)

At our most recent Elderhostel, we met several people who have bravely identified new directions for their lives. Donna, our historian/naturalist/guide, has written a book about her original dog training method. Dick, a retired federal civil servant, became an ordained Catholic deacon at the age of 64. Skip, an artist, and his sweet and strong social worker wife, Zenda, lived and worked in four different states in as many years after their children were grown and independent. But these are all still mainstream choices compared to the story we have to invent in the absence of any knowledge about the owner/artist who created the car pictured here. Ralph spotted it and gamely pulled over while I snapped a few pictures of it. Although producing car art is a new and popular pastime across the United States, there probably aren’t many automobiles decorated as elaborately as this one. Was it created just for fun? I’m guessing probably not, based on the serious themes that are represented pictorially and spelled out explicitly and repeatedly across the surface of the car. Is it so over-the-top and zealous that it might more properly belong in the category of outsider art (or art brut, tramp art, folk art)? The messages are earnest and simplistic but there is also witty word-play, for example the letters spelling out “Re-leaf” and “Be-leaf.” Look at these additional views of the car and see what you think.