Menopause

I just came back from the supermarket, where, in the frozen foods aisle, a woman of a certain age had opened one of the freezer doors and was standing in front of it, with her backside inside the freezer case. To the shoppers strolling past with their carts, she was unabashed. "I'm not apologizing. It's cool and it's free."

Violets and roses

Rosa glauca, from Wiki-commons

 It's been a year since my friend Laurie slipped away from the world, despite her brave fight.
 
When I visited her in Seattle, just a few weeks before she died, I remember walking into the little bungalow house she shared with her husband, my dear friend John, and their two grown daughters. The front walk passed beneath a wooden arbor that John had built for her, twined with a species rose just burgeoning with red new growth, and there were violets blooming in the small garden bed just inside the yard.

I told her how beautiful I thought they were, and John quite proudly told me about the rose. It was special, he told me, a rare and special rose that Laurie had planted years ago.

During that visit, she was still strong and we all thought she would stay with us longer. I went back to the hotel I was staying in during that visit, and thought about the rose, and how even in her illness Laurie was still surrounded by beauty and love. Then it came to me. The rose was rosa glauca. I had given Laurie a rooted slip from the plant that grew in my own garden, over fifteen years before - when our children were still babies.

What lasts are memories and love. Violets and roses.

It's all good

Here's a beautiful pastel sunset in the Santa Monica Mountains this evening.

I went back to the Imaging Center today, got squooshed and prodded and slimed. It's all good, nothing to worry about.

Sad sack

The beach at Castellammare, Pacific Palisades

 Sad Sack was an old comic strip character, dating from the 1940s. He was a lowly private in the U.S. Army, a poor dumb schlub experiencing bad luck, humiliation, and indignities at the hands of an uncaring establishment - and due to his own ineptness.

It's funny, though, to think of how one's sadness or depression would be something you carried along with you, in a sack, or a bag - a piece of scuffed up, awkward, burdensome luggage you can never check.

I've been feeling like a Sad Sack lately. It's 45 days until my job ends, and I still haven't succeeded in finding a new one. Job hunting is always a challenge, and I know from experience how much you have to deal with rejection and uncertainty when you job hunt. But knowing that doesn't makes me feel any less like a failure, and that makes me sad. I regret imagined things I might have done to deserve this; I think of opportunities I failed to rise to. I feel like I am carrying my sack of Sad along with me in everything I do, these days.

The Cat who sits

 

Heidi at Smalltown Me is the official curator of the Online Gallery of Vernacular Cat Art. I know she'll appreciate this graffitti example in Mexico City. Just past the Cafe La Habana on the Calle Bucareli, this mysterious cat waits serenely on a wall of a wine and liquor store.

Thematic photographic - Frozen

Carmi at the blog "Written, Inc." posts a photographic challenge each week at Thematic Photographic. This week, the theme is "Frozen."

Cantaloupe flavored paleta

In Los Angeles, as in Mexico, these icy, frozen fruit bars are called paletas, and they're available in a vast array of flavors. Not just a popsicle, the paleta can be chock full of natural ingredients, chunks of familiar or exotic fruits, suspended in their own juice or in cream, sometimes with nuts or spices like chile.

In Mexico City, there are plenty of ice cream shops, but for some reason the paleta is strongly identified with the city of Michoacan. Here on the busy corner of Calle de Lopez and Vizcainas, the La Michoacana Paleteria sells ice cream and frozen ice cream bars.

In Los Angeles, the brand of La Michoacana persists - this is an ice cream bar bought from a local corner store, flavored with cucumber and chile. Throughout the streets of L.A. as in Mexico City, paleteros, or paleta-vendors, push low, wheeled carts, jingling with bells.

Sour yellow cherry flavor

But business is good enough to sustain brick-and-mortar stores, too. Some ice cream stores also sell shakes, juice or vegetable smoothies, or licuados - shakes made with milk or cream.  For a restorative, you can get a vampiro, which is a bloody-red smoothie made with beets and carrots as well as orange and pineapple juice.

Mateo's paletas

Here's the array of paletas sold at Mateos, a small business with stores in Culver City and in the Pico neighborhood.

Fresa - strawberry - and cream

The name paleta means, literally, a trowel - a play on the shape of the ice cream bar.

Paleta vendors in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

Paleta flavors can be creative, with tropical fruit like mamey, tuna - the fruit of the cactus, guanabana, or soursop; you can get them made with cajeta, the caramelized condensed milk beloved by Mexicans; the rice-and-vanilla horchata - and many more.

Explore the frozen world beyond the popsicle! Try paletas!

Frida and Diego lived here

I wonder if it would strike Frida Kahlo as odd that she has become such an iconic and popular figure?  Overshadowed during her lifetime by her larger (literally!) and much more famous husband Diego Rivera, it wasn't until a 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera was published that she became well known outside of Mexico. Today, her brooding face with its signature bold eyebrows stares out at us from tote bags, coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets. She has become a mixed-up symbol of feminism, Mexican nationalism, sexuality and a kind of voluptuous suffering, all suffused with a kind of retro-glamor beauty that commands attention like a rock star.

Dancing with coyotes

Right in the heart of Coyoacan, two playful bronze coyotes crown a fountain in the Jardin Centenario. Coyoacan's name comes from the Nahuatl language and may mean "place of the coyotes" - but no one's quite sure. The park is at the heart of this historic and beautiful neighborhood, once a village but now absorbed into the urban sprawl of Mexico City.

Coyoacan's shady streets lined with historic buildings, its plazas with street cafes and shops,  naturally attracted artists, actors and writers. Diego Rivera, the famed muralist, and his artist wife Frida Kahlo lived in Coyoacan, as did Mexican movie star Dolores del Rio and filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Much like other similar charming artsy neighborhoods throughout the world, it has become a tourist attraction, and the streets are crowded on weekends and holidays, the sidewalks jammed with vendors and sightseers.

Street music

She stands on the corner of Calle Lopez and Ayuntamiento in the Central Historic District of Mexico City, wearing her khaki uniform and hat, and she balances the hefty Harmonipan barrel organ on its collapsible stick. Then she cranks the handle and the sounds pour forth. Piping, piercing, eerily wavering and yet also breathy with air pumped from its bellows, this is street music that hearkens back to the nineteenth century.