Here's a photo of Robbie, Allison and me from an earlier trip to CA last year:
Robin Lovell & the 'Rents'. Laguna 2004.
John Lovell. Gloucester 2005.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Time with Jim and Sheryl
Allison and I are having a great time in California with a wonderful couple: brother Jim and his wife Sheryl, all while celebrating our amazing Dad's 80th in Laguna.
Here's a photo of Robbie, Allison and me from an earlier trip to CA last year:
Robin Lovell & the 'Rents'. Laguna 2004.
John Lovell. Gloucester 2005.
Here's a photo of Robbie, Allison and me from an earlier trip to CA last year:
Robin Lovell & the 'Rents'. Laguna 2004.
John Lovell. Gloucester 2005.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Odds & ends: 'tytters and tatters"
Spring track has started for Cam and Jessie:
"Taking firsts against both teams, Lovell won both hurdles events, with wins in the 300 hurdles (43.2) and 110 hurdles (16.4). Phaneuf won the long jump (20-foot-4.5 inches) and the 4x400 team won with Duncan, Brian Parro, McLoughlin and Georgetown's Dan Small as the crew (3:51)."
--From 'Sports notebook' article; Thursday, April 14, 2005:
http://www2.townonline.com/ipswich
Jessie's first semi-formal
Here's a new photo of Jessie with Conrad Ahlin at St. John's semi-formal:
Irreplaceable wealth: something from Sean
Sean has recently taken a backward glance at his year in Paris in 2001. His reflection reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote in The Oxford History of English Literature in 1944: "[The sixteenth century] illustrates well enough the usual complex, unpatterned historical process; in which, while men often throw away irreplaceable wealth, they not infrequently escape what seemed inevitable dangers, not knowing that they have done either nor how they did it."
There is a large window in the back of the classroom at Fénelon Sainte-Marie which frames the top of a tree and a fourth floor limestone apartment. If you approach it closely, you will see an cathedral further down the road and the cars quickly scattering beyond it; open it during late summer, and you will feel the entering heat and see a boulangerie, whose ovens aired strongly amid our lectures and discussions.
It was in late summer during 2001 that I first looked through the large window. One hundred years ago, the school taught the daughters of the Catholic aristocracy, and while this has changed, it still bore the beautiful and faded marks of its extravagance, and had large, elaborate mirrors on the walls of each room, though they were speckled with age. The building contained within its walls the essential fabric of human past. Voices and footsteps were still faintly heard; young faces and smiles still ghost through the halls, though they were framed on the wall in a timeless, ethereal mosaic.
Later that afternoon, I had returned to apartment and heard the sound of a television. I approached to see who was home—
Pause.
There I saw Catherine, my host mother, standing upright and overwhelmed, embracing Marguerite, her daughter, and Paul-Arthur, her son, as three thousand lives were ended.
Here is a snapshot of time. There was the fourth story window; there were the girls at Fénelon; now, there are these three individuals with their arms around each other.
There is an infinity of these images that constitutes every moment of our lives; they abound massively; wherever you look, life is happening: it is fleeting and overlooked. I discovered my role within a much larger context: I was bound to Catherine, I was bound to those whose fatal ends I witnessed; somehow I was bound to the girls in the photo, though they are dead. I had never seen things this way before.
September twelfth was sunny, as the previous day had been. When the bell rang, I got up from my desk and turned towards the window and saw a girl standing alone at the small balcony, staring down at the crowd below. I called out to her in broken French, asking her name. She turned to me and, in English, answered with a puzzled look on her face, saying that her name was Kate, that she was an American, and wasn’t I was well?
Kate and I descended to the sidewalk; at the corner of rue Monceau and rue du Général-Foy, the roadwork continued and a new, pristine asphalt street trailed behind the large machines. Kate frowned when she saw that pavement that had replaced the cobblestones, perhaps the same stones those girls once walked on. These stones, snapshots of time and memories, lay in a truck. Whatever depth we imagine in our greatest treasures, it is only a shadow, an echo; its true beauty is lost and invariably missed.
Another exquisite poem from Cam:
Cloud Watching
Sucking surf, summer song,
Dance and laughing lovers long
Across the sand I scarcely see
This hiding island seems to be
A common ground for more than three
And perhaps a staggered throng.
Toothed and terraced to the tip
Serrated edges, should you slip,
(And if you are so lightly skinned)
Leave their mark with stinging scrapes.
Salted stone smooth glisten and shine
Beat buffed black by bashing brine.
But a blanket white and streaked with
Blue and green I’m blind to see
Island paradise unto the sea—
Beyond whipping wind, winter woes,
Worries, wishes, canticle foes,
Where laying back to watch the sky,
Behold the real world passing by
"Taking firsts against both teams, Lovell won both hurdles events, with wins in the 300 hurdles (43.2) and 110 hurdles (16.4). Phaneuf won the long jump (20-foot-4.5 inches) and the 4x400 team won with Duncan, Brian Parro, McLoughlin and Georgetown's Dan Small as the crew (3:51)."
--From 'Sports notebook' article; Thursday, April 14, 2005:
http://www2.townonline.com/ipswich
Jessie's first semi-formal
Here's a new photo of Jessie with Conrad Ahlin at St. John's semi-formal:
Irreplaceable wealth: something from Sean
Sean has recently taken a backward glance at his year in Paris in 2001. His reflection reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote in The Oxford History of English Literature in 1944: "[The sixteenth century] illustrates well enough the usual complex, unpatterned historical process; in which, while men often throw away irreplaceable wealth, they not infrequently escape what seemed inevitable dangers, not knowing that they have done either nor how they did it."
There is a large window in the back of the classroom at Fénelon Sainte-Marie which frames the top of a tree and a fourth floor limestone apartment. If you approach it closely, you will see an cathedral further down the road and the cars quickly scattering beyond it; open it during late summer, and you will feel the entering heat and see a boulangerie, whose ovens aired strongly amid our lectures and discussions.
It was in late summer during 2001 that I first looked through the large window. One hundred years ago, the school taught the daughters of the Catholic aristocracy, and while this has changed, it still bore the beautiful and faded marks of its extravagance, and had large, elaborate mirrors on the walls of each room, though they were speckled with age. The building contained within its walls the essential fabric of human past. Voices and footsteps were still faintly heard; young faces and smiles still ghost through the halls, though they were framed on the wall in a timeless, ethereal mosaic.
Later that afternoon, I had returned to apartment and heard the sound of a television. I approached to see who was home—
Pause.
There I saw Catherine, my host mother, standing upright and overwhelmed, embracing Marguerite, her daughter, and Paul-Arthur, her son, as three thousand lives were ended.
Here is a snapshot of time. There was the fourth story window; there were the girls at Fénelon; now, there are these three individuals with their arms around each other.
There is an infinity of these images that constitutes every moment of our lives; they abound massively; wherever you look, life is happening: it is fleeting and overlooked. I discovered my role within a much larger context: I was bound to Catherine, I was bound to those whose fatal ends I witnessed; somehow I was bound to the girls in the photo, though they are dead. I had never seen things this way before.
September twelfth was sunny, as the previous day had been. When the bell rang, I got up from my desk and turned towards the window and saw a girl standing alone at the small balcony, staring down at the crowd below. I called out to her in broken French, asking her name. She turned to me and, in English, answered with a puzzled look on her face, saying that her name was Kate, that she was an American, and wasn’t I was well?
Kate and I descended to the sidewalk; at the corner of rue Monceau and rue du Général-Foy, the roadwork continued and a new, pristine asphalt street trailed behind the large machines. Kate frowned when she saw that pavement that had replaced the cobblestones, perhaps the same stones those girls once walked on. These stones, snapshots of time and memories, lay in a truck. Whatever depth we imagine in our greatest treasures, it is only a shadow, an echo; its true beauty is lost and invariably missed.
Another exquisite poem from Cam:
Cloud Watching
Sucking surf, summer song,
Dance and laughing lovers long
Across the sand I scarcely see
This hiding island seems to be
A common ground for more than three
And perhaps a staggered throng.
Toothed and terraced to the tip
Serrated edges, should you slip,
(And if you are so lightly skinned)
Leave their mark with stinging scrapes.
Salted stone smooth glisten and shine
Beat buffed black by bashing brine.
But a blanket white and streaked with
Blue and green I’m blind to see
Island paradise unto the sea—
Beyond whipping wind, winter woes,
Worries, wishes, canticle foes,
Where laying back to watch the sky,
Behold the real world passing by
Monday, April 11, 2005
Thatcher's Island, August 2001
Robin, Sean, Jessie, Cameron: Twin Lights - August 2001.
If you close your eyes just a bit,
And gaze past the dying birch near the road,
Through the ashen spaces between branches
Soon filled with green, or else glance
Over while driving past the swells near Thatchers
Or Good Harbor, or perhaps just squint a bit
Around the room, setting your book on your lap,
The kids asleep now upstairs-if you close your eyes
So the light becomes that gossamer haze of distance,
You can nearly capture this moment, you can almost
Pan out from the room and street, lift far above the rooflines,
The clouds and atmosphere, planets and suns and their coursing
Through the hours, through the centuries. You'll say
"What's that bright jewel there below?" and in an instant
Find shelter there: bathed in faceted light, songs
Of angels all round (heartbreaking, heartening), praises and laughter,
Words of love and comfort at every turn, all swathed in
The distant and half-remembered scent of roses, sea-salt.
My darling, here's early heaven--some pure
And perfect gift, some secret garden we two now share. (I've heard:
"But a foretaste"--but a foretaste of honey is sweet from the start!)
Life together, with you, is the loveliest bit of heaven ever on earth.
--For Allison, 2001.
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