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Monday, April 7, 2014

L'Heure Bleue


I'll begin with a washtub full of toadstools.

You don't see many examples of great literature begin with the sentence over this one, so I'm off the hook. No pressure. Norma paints things "bleu", like buckets, buildings and old beloved rusted tools, and they become hers. I don't let her paint my 8-horsepower wood-chipper bleu, part of our marriage vow 45 years ago. Consider:
                                         My old shovel head!


                                           My little ladder!

                                                    My field-gate!

                                               My sainted grampa's bunghole borer!!!!

I find I am to blame, at least for the toadstools. I miscalculated the kindness of extraterrestrials. They came not as full-grown entities but as spores, not to save us from Atomic Destruction and politics of idiocy, but from being crushed by billions of trees falling over billions of years and not rotting away. My wood chipper provides cellulose material for toadstools to thrive. How did they get to earth? I have composed a palpable theory. Observe:
Here you see a toadstool from outer space preparing to dust our planet with spores and spare us from smothering under fallen trees by eating them up. How did I develop this theory? By observing the clues and silences on the subject in this girl for nearly half a century:
Is this the face of someone who'd paint things bleu for no particular reason? Decidedly, she is trying to tell us something, something important. Funding of education may be made impossible, the plug may be pulled on our internet and all human knowledge since paper books prove electronically written in disappearing ink, but paper made from trees will always be available. There is an intergalactic initiative to keep this planet producing pulp. It foments in the reader's heart, the cosmos and comes from out of the bleu.






18 comments:

  1. It is always such a delight to visit you.
    Happy anniversary to you and your beautiful Norma.
    45 years, wonderful !!!!!
    You made me smile
    Thank you, Geo

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    1. To be accurate, we are in our 45th year of legal wedlock --our 44th anniversary is some months past-- but we met 3 years ahead of that and made friends with each other. By and by I realized the future available to us together was greater than any I had imagined alone. Now, in our 60s, I wonder how selves so young could make such a lasting and happy decision!

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  2. Well, one cannot deny that the face of the lovely girl is one that radiates deep wisdom. So perhaps she does have knowledge that is hidden from most of the rest of us. And I must say that I will never again be able to watch toadstools flying overhead without a feeling a sense of wonder. Quite what I will be wondering about is, of course, quite another matter. May you and Norma be around for many, many more years. You are the leaven in the dough of humanity.

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    1. Merci beaucoup, Tom! Our youngest grandson (3 yr.s old) refers to Norma as "the girl with blue (bleu?) eyes."

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  3. Happy belated anniversary.

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  4. Blue has always been my favorite color and you've managed to enhance it with an entirely fresh perspective. Norma's blue streak is delightful....

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    1. I am indeed fortunate to have her and toadstools but I just tried saying "bleutifully" several times and now I can't talk right anymore!

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  6. This made me smile: happy anniversary.

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  7. Dear Geo.,
    when I looked at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaue_Stunde I saw that Norma has already collected the Brandenburger Tor, The Palace of Westminster and the Frauenkirche in Munich by envelopping them in that beautiful blue veil of L'heure Bleue (Givenchy does it too: a weil of that perfume and you are - captive).
    We have an acquaintance who brought the painter of his livingroom to tears: 9 times the poor man had to repaint - till it was the 'right' blue. (There exists a doppelgänger, E.F.Benson, my oh-so-beloved author - he did the same with a blue in a church window for him, in Rye).
    Congratulation to your anniversary!

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    1. Thank you, dear Brigitta. I looked up the url you sent and delighted in the photos! The Blue Hour is truly lovely and, paradoxically, timeless. I have seen Norma paint and repaint parts of our garden, not by any obsessive perfectionism --though some suspect it-- but because L'heure Bleue exists inside her and must be expressed.

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  8. Your beloved has painted your world with clearly her favorite color. You are a blessed man.

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    1. Agreed, Susan. I would stake the accuracy of your assessment on my sainted grampa's bunghole borer!

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  9. Does she feel compelled to paint the toadstools, I wonder...

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