Sunset on Waikiki Beach

O, Perfect Day

Inspired by the view from our beach backyard in Honolulu

Sitting on the sand near the shore, I watch the sun start its lazy descent.

Its brilliance begins to drench the ocean side in a haze of golden light. The air is filled with a soft dust that seems to catch and hold the last particles of the sinking sun.

Paddlers are tying up their outrigger canoes. Atop the rocky ledge jutting out from the shore, lit tiki torches begin to burnish the twilight darkness with a shimmering flame. As the crimson rim slowly leaves the horizon, stillness starts to settle over everything. 

It has to be the most outrageous sunset I have ever seen.

It is vast and exotic and powerful. I look at it and I know it has been the same for a thousand years, and yet how it seems to be new each day.

As I reflect on its radiant glow, I feel the sudden rush of contentment of being cocooned in a special place and a special time. I hate to end it by leaving. I'm preserving this Perfect Day by doing what I can hardly ever remember doing before.

Nothing. 

Cine Rosie

O, Perfect Day

It is the divine attribute of the imagination that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself, and with necromantic power, can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions.- Washington Irving

I like Saturday afternoons because I know this is the help's time off. It means Aling Luring will be writing the requisite letter to her mother in the province, but after that it's movie time at the Cine Rosie.

I patiently wait for her to finish. Are you done yet? I say with a pout. Ay, be patient, she answers with nonchalance. I keep tugging at her skirt until she finally folds and posts the letter. Can we go now? I ask eagerly. Oo! she finally declares.

The cinema is only a few blocks from the house, but we always ride the jeepney. Mummie always gives us an extra ten centavos for fare, so I don't have to sit on Aling Luring's lap.

As we enter the lobby, I stand, open-mouthed, at the larger-than-life scenarios featured on wall posters. I cringe at the sight of a large hairy ape menacing City Hall. He has a distressed damsel in his clutch. I hear in my mind the throbbing music from young pop stars emulating the likes of Amrikan singers. In the dark corners, I can swear that I can detect koboys whose faces shine with savage glee, lying in wait for the Indyans on horses, skittering and neighing.

Once inside, I focus my eyes in the darkness. Presently I see the pretty face of the leading lady of Because Of A Flower. How gently she gazes at her newfound love, both of them caught up in the naive excitement of first love. He whispers to her in a reassuring, trite way.

A half hour into the movie and I am already lost in another world filled with life's intricacies - the shadows peeled back and redeemed by a layer of reality of grownup concerns and foibles.

I squint in befuddlement trying to understand some of the dialogue and the events laid out on the screen. I can gather as much that something sad is happening because not only the characters but Aling Luring and some of the women nearby are crying as well - sighing and discreetly wiping a tear with a flowered hankie or the corner of a rumpled blouse.

But all movies end happily, it seems to me. I know enough that when the music plays, the lovers will hold hands and kiss. That's when I cover my eyes but still manage to look between the space of my fingers, while suppressing a giggle of shy delight. 

Th' end. The lights come up. We emerge into the sunburst of the afternoon. 

On the way home and some days after, I ruminate on the colors, the images, the words of what I have just seen. I review in my mind the expressive faces, imitate the twitch, speak as in an angry growl, fancy how it is to cry and kiss. I pucker my lips, but no! - too gross.

It is one perfect day that I will keep in a private nook of my mind and relish for many days after.

Up A Lazy River

O, Perfect Day

Up a lazy river in the noonday sun

Throw away your troubles, dream with me.

I'm floating along in a tube up Lazy River, an attraction in the 22-acre Zoombezi Bay water park. It is a splashy sanctuary touting 200,000 gallons of water enveloping me in 850 feet of calming twists and turns.

I'm comfortably snug atop a colorful, jouncing inner tube, letting her buoy me up wherever the current wants her to. Like Huck Finn, I'm thinking, there warn’t no home like a raft after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. 

Dangling my leg in the water, I pretend that I have lit a pipe, but unlike Huck I decide to keep my trusty suit on. I glide down, thinking about my trip down the waterway. 

Then, I close my eyes imagining that nightfall has come. In the moonlight, I'm floating, singing, and laughing. It is a peaceful, undisturbed journey. I ignore the noise and deem that everything is perfectly still - not a sound anywhere, as if the whole world were asleep.

I'm reckoning that two or three days and nights have gone by. I might say they have swum by, sliding along so quiet and smooth and lovely. My raft moves with the flow of the water, constantly pushing me to new, unseen places as the days and nights simply blend together.

I get a delightful sense that I'd lost my identity, but it's okay. I'm too deliciously warm and lazy to bother regaining my visibility.

Water Lilies

Flowers Of May

Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears. - Flaubert

I’m totally drawn. 

Here at the Musee d’Orsay, I’m charmed by a gigantic depiction of water with weeds waving in the depths on a surface covered with paint. It’s Monet’s Nympheas bleus, a naïve impression of drifting blue water lilies carried by ripples in a pond.

I trace with my eyes the seemingly hurried scrawls and patches, the rough brush strokes highlighting the round edges of the lily pads. The latter are suspended loosely in a circle, some drifting further away from the others.

Beyond are textures and details of color. The lines are free, detached from literal forms. There is a little square of blue. Here a streak of yellow. Almost a close-up of a shapeless surface. Lavender is interspersed with green.

There is no horizon or bank. Water spills over the unfinished borders of the canvas in mysterious shades and shapes. It looks like freedom. It is infinity, like the firmament.

I can imagine the water emptying into the river and the river running down the valley and through the big city and emptying into the sea and the sea returning to land somewhere as a river and the river becoming many streams that empty into a river that flows into a sea.

Above and below, near and far – lilies and water all commingle in a mystical, harmonious way.

An infinite, limitless fragment.

The Illusion of an Endless Whole. 

Picnic In Chartres

O, Perfect Day

Other world! There is no other world!

Here or nowhere is the whole fact. - Emerson

Chartres makes me think happy thoughts. Warm thoughts. It makes me think about sunshine radiant on the Eure River, the warm light on the ancient bridge criss-crossing the river. 

Only about an hour by train from Paris, this medieval city nestles underneath a hill crowned by its famous Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Chartres. 

Seated on a park bench, I scan the surroundings. It is so beautiful here, I murmur, cupping my chin in one hand. There is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness. The streets are steep and narrow and clean, the day full of possibility. Around me, life teems. Everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. 

I begin to meticulously unwrap the brown paper package of the baguette bought from the boulangerie close by, then retrieve small chunks of cheese each separated by small squares of wax paper.

I alternate nibbling on the bread's crisp crust and taking tiny bites from supple slices of muenster cheese. Then I linger on the smooth paste-like texture of the camembert, and poke my tongue into the large, eye-like holes of the gruyere. Every bite is an almost impossible flavor, the sensation of something soft-ripened, washed with eau de vie. With the other hand, I clutch a large cup of filtered, relatively weak coffee - cafe americain.

I watch, dazzled by so much life and color, happiness soaring inside me - all the while savoring an explosion of flavors in my mouth. My Plebeian Meal has been elevated into a Lavish Banquet.

I smile with unabashed pleasure as I look out at the sweet, endless blue of the sky. What else is there to say on a day like this, when the weather is so very fine, that it makes me wonder if the universe is nothing but the dream of a drunken God who has fallen asleep on a silken cloud.

Fireworks Over A Columbus Sky

A pittance of a ladies cocktail drink at the Elevator Brewery can get me easily wasted, but not enough to incapacitate my ability to celebrate Red, White, and Boom in verse.

Shooting lights collide with sundown,

Brightening up the sky like a thousand blazing stars, 

One next to another to another; 

Taking the shadows of the past, leaving only the present 

Gleaming against the shadow of night.