The Moon Blooms

Diamonds and rain

(Editor's note: The branch at left is the same river birch, leafless in winter)

Last year, a thunderstorm rattled the river birch that straddles our side yard and the neighbor's, snapping a jagged branch off the birch and impaling the green patio umbrella we'd bought five years earlier when installing our courtyard off the kitchen.

C'est la vie, we thought. The umbrella had been a good buy but it's pool-table green cloth had faded badly to a slightly verdant shade of gray. The storm had given us an excuse to invest in a better umbrella that more closely matched the freshly painted red trim on our white Acadian cottage.

Joy found a brilliant red umbrella, larger than its predecessor, and a nice splash of color in the courtyard to complement the house. We admired it each day when pulling up to the house after work. The crimson umbrella set off the lighter green river birch and the deeper, waxy green ligustrum behind it in striking ways: a good purchase, an economic good with aesthetic appeal, but hardly the stuff of life lessons.

Or so we thought. Some weeks later, after an especially exhausting day at work, I found myself whiling away some evening time with idle games on the computer, when I heard my wife first groan, then follow with a chilling utterance, "Shoot fire!"

To understand the import of that expression, you must first know that ours is a household that's virtually curse-free, free at least of the conventional, contemporary vulgar curses of the four-letter variety. But whether one curses freely or not, there comes a time when everyone needs to get out an oath at a moment of upsetting truth or physical pain. (For my grandmother, it was the quaint expression, "Dear Gussie!"). In my wife's family, "shoot" passed for a fairly serious oath, but "shoot fire!" occasioned a truly serious moment of bad news.

Hence, I pushed back my computer chair with great trepidation and looked through the door into the bathroom. Joy had lost a diamond necklace, given to her by her mother, who had received it as a cherished gift from her recently deceased husband, and the object of all that sentiment now lay somewhere down the bathroom sink drain and perhaps in irretrievable chaos in the city's storm sewer.

Or maybe not. Sensing my weariness, Joy began to cover the vanity so we wouldn't use it until finding time to explore things further the following day. I, in turn, sensed her frustration and knew there was no time like the present to plumb the depths of this dilemma. After breaking down the gooseneck plumbing below the sink, I reached into the open pipe and pulled out, to my surprise, the slinky, sterling chain with the diamond pendant attached and untroubled by its bath in the water trap.

There are few discoveries so sweet as those made when the heart has sunk, when the soul senses the errand may be fruitless, and the mind reasons that hope will not be requited. A short time later, another thunderstorm washed our Louisiana lawn, and my heart gushed forth with gratitude, not merely for the rediscovered diamond in the plumbing, not merely for the rain dripping from the river birch, not only for the water puddling on the pink-and-gray patio bricks. But there, atop that crimson umbrella, came streams of diamonds cascading down the canvas in ephemeral beauty: bright, silvery, luminous beads of water in a brilliance unlike anything I'd ever seen.

The mind told me this, that the marvels of modern chemistry can create water-repellant coatings to capture and bead water in these spectacular patterns. But the heart told me another thing: When my life, fast approaching middle age, appeared to be heading toward no special destination, God brought me Joy, and her beauty radiates through each day in ways I could never have imagined.

C'est la vie, indeed.

Their Big Fat Greek Album (Burlap to Cashmere to Me)

I have little idea what most of the songs on Burlap to Cashmere's self-titled 2010 album mean, but it doesn't mean they're not memorable.  Out of the blue, in a restaurant or from the back seat of the car, my son may sing "I will ride my bus" and my daughter echo "my bus," and the song "Digee Dime" is summoned (oops, sorry, that's from their 1998 album, "Anybody Out There?") and that unforgettable chorus, "digee dime, digee dime, digee dime," rings out, which, whatever it means, we love.  Or there is my wife's favorite profundity from (it seems like) several of their songs, Steven Delopoulos's "hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey," her less robust version issuing forth when I least expect.  Or there's that great line from "Orchestrated Love Song, the wistful "I wanna live on a boat and sail away with my children," once again sung by daughter, and we all nod inwardly in agreement.  It's like a shared lexicon, shorthand album-speak --- one quip, one phrase, and the entire song, the entire album is conjured up.  Their music has become a sonic appendage to our family life, shared space.

via www.outwalking.net

I don't know if it's because I love Greek food or have been to Greece and want to go back again. But I agree wholeheartedly with this appraisal. I also don't know if Steven Delopoulos is as good a songwriter as Bob Dylan, but he's a far better stylist. No more gifted singer-songwriter has emerged in the past two decades — and the gift here has much to do with an uncanny knack for living up to the name of the group, a knack for taking the common and rendering it precious, a knack for taking raw, sere burlap and conditioning it into perfectly smooth cashmere that envelopes the soul ...

"God of light, light me some passion
Green fields and lovely mansions
Let your mansions live inside me
Love me, light me, give me, guide me ..."

An Inspiring Eccentricity

As Auld Lang Syne encroaches, I'm not altogether eager to jettison 2011. I write this as I'm gazing upon a 2012 calendar with the words Inspirational Life emblazoned across an aquamarine fjord, beside a bank of evergreen firs, below a craggy set of snow-dusted mountains.

It's clearly a Scandinavian scene. But the calendar fell into our laps in Mississippi. The day after Thanksgiving, as my mother-in-law conversed with fellow breakfast diners on the way out of a downtown restaurant, an octogenarian funeral director bounced out of his seat and dropped an Inspirational Life into my hands and another calendar into my wife's hands. We thanked him, but we would hardly need a calendar to remember him. There are eccentrics, there are wickedly daft eccentrics, and then there is this man.

"I've had sixteen inches of toes cut off this year," he'd proudly told us an hour earlier, promising to leave when our breakfast arrived – if we still had an appetite. He continued to sit at our table and regale us with funeral humor until our repast began. The food was not memorable, but, oh, this man was unforgettable.

He fondled a wide-brim straw hat as he talked. He spoke of his wife, 25 years his junior, spending 20 hours of her day – every day – under an oxygen tent. Wearing a silk scarf of royal blue, orange and green paisley patterns about his neck, he nodded across the restaurant to a table, almost hidden, by the kitchen door. "I sit there," he said, "so I can run back in the kitchen if I see somebody I don't like. And they'll let me eat back there."

Adroitly, he slips the vicissitudes of his funeral business into our conversation, talks about the challenges of finding good help, and relates his desire to climb a new mountain of business success in 2012. This, from a man who'll soon be 87.

He pushes back his chair and begins to leave. Then he stops in mid-stride, pulling his seat closer to the table. "Y'all got time for me to tell you something funny? Listen to this ..."

He speaks of a somber afternoon in the funeral parlor. A rotund woman sits on an antique settee, dabbing here cheeks with a handkerchief. A prim, slimmer woman sits beside her. As the funeral director walks past them, offering his solicitude, the large, grieving woman breaks out with an incongrous question.

"How old ARE you?" she asks the funeral director. He leans in, conspiratorially, and tells us at our breakfast table: This woman is every bit of 450 pounds. And so, I threw a question right back at her.

Mirth etches every line of his pink face. His mismatched blazer parts as he leans back, revealing a magenta-and-turquoise silk sash cinching his cordoroys. Mischief dances in his eyes.

"You know what I told her? I said, 'I'll tell you how old I am IF you tell me how much you weigh.' Well, that woman next to her took to laughing so hard, she fell out off the sofa and just starting rolling all over the floor. Busted out laughing all over the floor!"

The rotund woman just glared at him, he said, her weight remaining a mystery and her appearance something that, on this morning, would have sent him scampering for the kitchen. He glances over his shoulder, though, and sees nothing to fear among the diners. He laughs again, harder, and we laugh with him, wishing at some level that we had the bravado to be so plain-spoken and so utterly free-spirited.

Later, after he placed the calendars in our hands, we walked into the cold sunshine on the street and chuckled anew. This incomparable eccentric, this Liberace of the morturary business – crazy as a loon on the surface – had given us cause to reconsider this day, and the days ahead. Is it possible to be outlandish and responsible at the same time?

My wife reminded me that before her father died, he'd insisted on this very man overseeing his burial because the funeral director was as famous for his punctuality – something my father-in-law prized – as he was infamous for his sartorial style and personal candor. The funeral was pitch-perfect.

It hardly makes sense to me now, how a man could appear so flippant in public yet maintain such sought-after decorum. But I'm still laughing about that morning, still amazed by the eccentricity of it, and more certain than ever of one thing: I'll never hold a candle to this man's outlandishness. And so be it.

An Amy Rigby song comes to mind: a paean to beer-gut fishermen, aloof daughters wearing chipped fingernail polish, and unshaven husbands with mussed up hair at the breakfast table: Hey – I love you – you're perfect – don't ever change.

I find myself flipping forward into 2012, through the Inspirational Life calendar, and I land on March. There's the same brilliant Scandinavian fjord, only this time the mountains sit a bit farther back, and the view takes in a bit of the shoreline. There, a pair of pink wildflowers, towering like gladiolas to the sky, take over the scene.

To the left of the glassy lake, a verse from 2 Corinthians reminds that "God loveth a cheerful giver." I close the calendar and smile. 

A Shaqalicious Saturday Night

There he stood.

Or rather, there he dunked.

Frozen in bronze, beside a row of palm trees, in 40-degree weather.

We're not sure if the massive sculpture of Shaquille O'Neal at LSU's new basketball practice facility is larger than life or not. Shaq himself is larger than life. So, let's settle for large as life.

What's large about life at the moment is the opportunity to get out of the cold and be bathed in purple and gold in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. My wife and I pass Shaquille O'Neal, the warrior perpetually dunking in front of that gleaming, multimillion-dollar practice facility – The House that Shaq Built in front of The House that Pete Built.

To our left, a lonely, blond brick structure is scarcely noticed by the passers-by huddled in the cold. It's a classical natatorium where my grandmother swam. The moonlight and gnarled, live oak branches nearby soften the effect, but the natatorium is dying a slow death, neglected as a lesser muse on a campus focused on the demigods of spectator sports.

We hurry into the basketball arena that resembles a hulking flying saucer. Not long ago, an Arkansas sportswriter opined that the modernist PMAC is a blight among SEC basketball arenas, a goofy anachronism that ought to go the way of the wrecking ball. I look at the natatorium, smile and think of Arkansas's recent lean years of basketball. Not much better than our own. I smile again at the thought of beating the pigskin Razorbacks 41-17 on Thanksgiving weekend and think: Not much good comes from Hogs, save for bacon and Carl Sandburg.

Inside, we order hot dogs and Coke Zeros (why do we keep drinking these things, because they're there?); popcorn comes later. The PMAC doesn't fill up like the old days. Basketball crowds seem to run in inverse proportion here to the zenith of LSU football fortunes. But Pete Maravich would be proud of the new crop. Johnny O'Bryant (The Third! as arena announcer Dan Borne likes to remind us) is a dunking machine in dreadlocks, only a few inches shorter than Shaq. Anthony Hickey, a ballhandling wizard in dreadlocks, is a foot shorter but a bundle of basketball talent plucked, somehow, by LSU Coach Trent Johnson after a Mr. Kentucky Basketball season. Both players are freshmen, and the future bounces brightly.

Johnson's team tonight is playing his alma mater, Boise State, and the coach in his pregame banter dismisses new school-old school rivalries as "nonsense." We take him at his word. It has been, after all, 33 years since Johnson donned the blue-and-burnt orange in Boise. 

On the court, much remains the same this season. Mike the Tiger dances clumsily beside the glitzy, graceful Tiger Girls. But Mike manages to outshine the competition. He wears a newfangled, blinking wreath of purple-and-gold lights around his belly. His Tiger costume is topped by a purple Santa suit trimmed in gold fringe. He is the Liberace of the hardwood.

Much also continues to change. The hip-hop music here seems foreign and fantastic to us baby boomers, except on occasions when a few measures of familiar yuletide melodies are sampled in on this Saturday, a fortnight before Christmas. For us old fogeys, the Tiger Band even blends in some brassy versions of "Sweet Caroline," "Shake Your Booty" and "Jungle Boogie" -- the latter two scandalous in their day but seeming tame beside the new standards.

Other things are changing and yet are not changed. In a new media enclave at one end of the court, venerable sports editor Butch Muir of The Advocate settles into a perch to scout the Tigers. His game writer sits a couple of rows below him. From our purple seats up in the crowd, we spot former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown yakking to a confidant. Brown, even now, I can see as an enthusiastic new head coach in the summer of '72 walking across the PMAC with a recruit, coaxing him to play basketball here before the first of a thousand games since.

Our family moved out of state that summer, and would move again. And again. And again. But here the PMAC still sits, fresher and newer than I remember from the past and filled with dazzling new stars and a 7-foot mountain boy from Utah, by way of Iowa. 

We lead such vagabond lives these days, plowing through transitory fields, that finding anything as consistent as a 40-minute game, still played on a wooden court, still celebrated by zany students, and still attended by dowagers in gaudy, tiger-striped scarfs seems eternally satisfying.

And always, there's the game. This one began rather badly, LSU down 22-17 late in a tedious first half. Yet the Tigers would break through in the final stanza, outscoring the boys from Idaho 47-23 down the stretch. Speaking of permanency, I spy the venerable basketball sports information director, Kent Lowe, fiercely clutching something in the middle of the court after the win. A microphone, perhaps? Something for an immediate Trent Johnson interview at center court? I pull out my binoculars to see better, and laugh: The charcoal object he grips like a scepter is some oversized mobile phone with a composite antenna. Change ...

Waiting outside the restroom for my wife, I gaze at the metal plaques on the concourse Wall of Fame. There dribbles LSU's first basketball All-America, Sparky Wade. Nearby is his coach, the hat-wearing Harry Rabenhorst. We step outside, briskly descend the steps from the flying saucer and there he remains: Shaq, the perpetual dunking machine, frozen in the moonlight. This season, we will see him again and again, and yet we will never see that again. Not that move. Not that man.