Art and Life on A Happy Weekend

For some reason I have more trouble writing about happy days than aggravating ones. I suppose that’s because happy times leave an aura of contentment, a state difficult to describe.

The same is true of people.

People you really like are harder to describe than ones who are a pain.

That holds true even in fiction. Villains come out easier than heroes. An evil person leaps to life on a page; a saint comes across as unbelievable. I think that’s because as a writer, I can easily imagine characters worse than I am. But, for the life of me, I can’t imagine a person better than I am.

This is not vanity; it’s physics.

Water can’t rise higher than its source.

Familiarity enters into it too.

When I say the name Ginny I’ve said it all. In that one name, 40 years of love, trials, joys, pleasures, frustrations, memories are all summed up. The name Ginny conjures up a thousand thousand conversations, glimpses, tears, laughs, thoughts.

If I were to have to describe her, I’d describe the girl I courted 40 years ago because in my mind’s eye that’s how I still see her. She will forever be 22-years-old sitting on a curb waiting for me to get out of class — and her present-day white hair does not exist unless I especially look directly at her sitting across the table from me with the sunset behind her giving her hair a blaze of silver glow.

Then I see a new beauty.

Apart from that, her white hair does not exist.

Odd, that.

Anyhow, Ginny and I spent a delightful weekend together. Saturday morning we met our son Donald and his wife Helen for breakfast at Dave’s Diner. Then the four of us visited the Riverside Art Festival to compare Helen’s fine graphics with the stuff on display. We urged her to enter an exhibit next year.

While the others looked at art, I looked at women in the crowd.

It appears that this year’s art show attracted the world’s largest assembly of ugly women wearing extremely low-cut blouses.

A strange dichotomy.

The four of us shopped at the Presbyterian Church jumble sale across the street where Donald, the ratfink, bought a stuffed piranha, a vicious carnivore fish from the Amazon, that I was eyeing and intending to buy.

The Presbyterians only had one single piranha for sale.

Now Donald owns a stuffed piranha — and I don’t.

There is no justice in the universe.

I hope his cat eats it.

Speaking of Donald and Helen, a couple of times recently I’ve spoken of how helpful the free e-mail devotions Donald sends out have been to me.

Now, over the weekend, he has published a 2008 Pin Up Girl Calendar and posted a link on his blog.

Yep, deep devotions one day, pin-up girls the next.

That apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it?

The calendar girls are not real human women but imaginary computer graphic creations called Animes.

No human females are actually shaped like that —

Or, if there are, none of them were at the art show.

I would have noticed.