Summer garden

It's raining sheets

There are certain situations in life that call for the purchase of new, bright pink bedsheets. Like after he leaves. It's not a celebratory thing. You just want something new on the bed.

Then it rains. Again.

Then the sun comes out. Might there be a rainbow? You rush to take a picture.

So does he. The door to the upstairs apartment slams.

Why now

Why is it that now, of all times, people seem to come at me with gems like this? --

"That Skinny Girl margarita. Did you know Bethenny Frankel sold the rights to that drink mix to some big company for millions of dollars? ... And her dad left her and her mom when she was, like, three. She never forgave him for it. "

"No, I can see why." 

"Can you imagine doing that? The guy must have really hated his wife."

"Mmmm."

Then, Jim the butcher: "I need your husband's help."

Ah-hah.

It seems that Jim and his wife own houses locally which they rent out, and they have recently received an application from a would-be renter who claimed to work at the local fire department. They want to check up on this guy and find out if he really is employed there -- where my husband is (my daughter now calls her father simply "the Sir," and points toward the ceiling, in other words to the upstairs apartment, when speaking about him). I think Jim expected me to involve the Sir in this investigation in some way. I simply suggested he call the fire department, whose number I do know by heart after twenty-four years, and ask about the ostensible employee himself. I think he was somewhat taken aback by the simplicity of it.

The next day: "Are you John's wife?" the lady asked.

Ummm ...

She knows of him through the volunteer appearances he has put in at her grandchildren's schools. "Such a nice man. He said you worked here and that the next time I was in, I should look you up."

"Oh, yes! And what's your name?"

"Mary Costello."

"Oh, yes, that sounds familiar." So she went away flattered and pleased.

More in the garden

And -- of course, this is wildly off topic, but have you noticed? -- how much conservative pundits (mostly men) dislike Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? I almost think that, having spent their careers commenting on and observing politics, and growing gray and weak-eyed in the process, they really resent their thunder and their punditry and their relevance being stolen by moms with long brown hair.

"Bachmann panders to conservative intellectuals," Commentary

"One if by land, two if by sea, three if by Palin," Commentary

To be fair, both these columns above were written by the same man (yay for fact-checking!), but I have a vague sense that my point holds. Maybe that's why I'm not a pundit, and am also a mom with long-ish brown hair. .

Flowers

The mature garden

Most of it is a feast of green, in the bright slanting evening sun. But below, first, are last month's bleeding hearts.

Asiatic lilies wait to bud, crowded in beside bearded iris, cranesbill, and a mass of goldenrod. The robins chirp and carol away as always, whether in the dim gray mist of early morning or the long, steadily darkening twilights. This big old house with its big old mulberry tree has sheltered and overlooked much life, and many years and happiness. And I suppose there are robins anywhere. The mature garden, however, is mine. 

Joy

How many future historians, a hundred, two hundred years from now, will make careers out of studying President Barack Obama? I wonder if he might not turn out to be the most discussed and analyzed person in American history -- or will he, by contrast, be quickly slotted into his proper place? -- a very little man, a freak of collapsing early 21st-century American academia, pet of a whole superclass of citizens, the media, who propelled him into power by ignoring everything he was? Not that the voting public, alas, weren't dreadfully to blame.

This latest episode in his life provides us with the most delicious piece of irony and poetic justice it is possible to conceive. So he authorizes the killing of Osama bin Laden, the archfiend. Good. Congratulations. Yet the Greek-tragedy-and-hubris perfection of it seems beyond human arrangement. Of all things, what should Mr. Obama now be known for, what albatross now hangs around his neck? He who delights in his Muslim background but lacks the gravitas to really espouse any faith except the America-bashing one of his former Chicago church, he who wanted to, say, redesign NASA as a vehicle of outreach to the Muslim world and apologized for Americanness at Cairo and anyplace else that would host him, he who comes from a college world where the United States, the military and the masculine are about equally loathed, he who supported the Ground Zero mosque and wanted to try the 9/11 mastermind as a citizen with full Constitutional rights in a Manhattan courtroom -- and so on, all these noble views of course contingent upon polling data and re-election prospects -- he now has used America's most extraordinary soldiers to kill the most famous America-hating Muslim in the world. It seems he had to do it, literally. His re-election prospects could never have survived any leaked word that he had a chance to do it and passed it by. (Couldn't they?) And when it was over he had to go out and announce it to the world from the White House late on a Sunday night, just as if he were President.

I wonder if it wasn't one of the bitterest moments of his life. No, not because he "killed a fellow Muslim." I repeat, I doubt he has a real faith to speak of. But being impelled to do something because the position of the presidency is larger than himself must have been infuriating. The reason he won't get a "bump" in approval from this is not only because it's still the economy stupid, but because everyone, right or left, knows this one dramatic act is totally out of character for him. The path to it was laid down by other men in other years. Heroism, action, decision making, is the last thing he wants to be around. The order that bin Laden's body must be correctly treated according to Islamic law after being shot up -- now that is in character. And not because by it he was "burying a fellow Muslim." Rather because such a picayune, theatrical command is totally in keeping with our president's emotional background: the provincial professor accustomed to trotting out his special subject, the play-President who likes the job's little powers, the wildly inexperienced adult who wants ownership of a group project but lacks an adult sense of the grotesque. Lacks taste, simply put.

So, yes, congratulations.Good luck living it down among your friends.