Nothing pretty about these pictures. Zucchini on top, summer squash on the bottom. At least that's my guess. I post them because there’s something we should remember. All fruits and vegetables, unless I missed something, begin as flowers. Some we eat before they mature. Lettuce, for example. But to plant and eat lettuce and related vegetables, we must harvest them before they are mature and allow a portion of the crop to go to seed. The seed is next year’s crop, and it comes from allowing the lettuce to flower. Apples and oranges come from trees covered in tiny, but beautiful flowers. Eventually, the base of the flowers swell into fruit. And closer to the ground, zucchini and summer squash, if that's what they are, follow the same pattern.

These pictures were taken in a stretch of ground between the sidewalk and a fence defining the limits of a trailer park. I suppose today that would be a mobile home park. I watched the lady who maintains this stretch plant little plugs of plants in empty spaces. It seems like yesterday. They grew at a ferocious pace. The squash have huge leaves that hide the flowers, and the zucchini have long, straight stems that give the flowers full sunshine. If she does what she did last year, she’ll let them grow until harvest time and then pull them up. They are temporary, but they are also food bearing. Eventually, she will plant watermelon to replace them. She has a very tiny farm along the sidewalk.

When I was in school I was taught that a big differences between plants and animals is mobility. Animals move, plants are stationary. You had to know that for the test. But the teacher was also a realist. He said that if an apple falls to the ground and a horse eats it, and he doesn’t poop for a hundred yards, then the seeds of that apple tree have moved one hundred yards. So, fruits and vegetables exist to give plants what they otherwise lack: mobility. Some fruits are so volatile that the horse is lucky to make it ten yards. Others go down and stay down with such ease that the horse can run and frolic all day before planting seed in manure wrapped piles. And it all starts with flowers.

I think I like the accidents better than the intentional photographs. As if my subconscious is trying to communicate with me. This appears to have almost nothing to say, though the word “delete” is troubling. Maybe that’s the message. It reminds me of Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more.” In fact, less becomes so much more that words seem unable to capture it. Flowers are easy by comparison, and family snapshots, and pictures of walls and buildings. But remove the flowers and the family members. Remove everything down to the background, and then the background itself with all or most of the details, and then tell me what’s left. If you say nothing, then you’ve missed the point.

I’ve posted several pictures of this flower before, but again I could not resist. It’s growing inches from the ground in a neglected garden. As beautiful as ever, it demonstrates a determined effort to survive, if not in this generation, then in the next. Flowers, beautiful or otherwise, have a wisdom that humans lack for the most part. They prioritize. Every last ounce of energy is used to flower. As I’ve said many times before, we could learn a great deal from flowers if we just paid attention.

Like squinting into the sun, except this is the nightlight at the back entrance to the market. I seldom walk this way at night, but I came home late and to avoid cars racing around the corner and crashing into a slow, darkly clad pedestrian, I hugged the sidewalk near the corner. It seemed strangely mysterious at the time, because I walk this way almost every day in sunlight and never once noticed it.

This strikes me in many ways as a very ordinary photograph. But there’s some about it that really connects with me. It has a nearness and a hardness about it. A sort of barren patch surrounds it. Green mixed with orange and then bright orange and yellow flowers. Vertical and tilted. That’s a lot of things, but not exactly what connects me to it. It’s not the first thing that caught my eye or the most seemingly important, but there’s something about it. Actually, I think it’s the color. The orange and yellow..

When I was young the decorator made an orange seat cover or pad for a Danish chair in my bedroom — a chair by Hans Wegner, not that anyone knew who Hans Wegner was back then. I asked why he chose orange, and he said, “Because orange is your favorite color.” My mother told him that. It was news to me. My mother knew things that others didn’t, so I was careful not to say that it wasn’t. I don’t remember giving it any thought in truth. And while I’ve never done much with orange, I’ve always held it in a kind of reverence. Orange tapering into yellow. I’ve always wondered if she just made that up or if there was something to it. She didn’t say orange and yellow, but of course she knew that orange tapers into yellow, just like the flowers of this plant. It’s a vibrant combination, so unlike anything else. Purple tapering into lavender is nice, but not the same. It’s not orange. Not yellow.

If we pay attention we can learn things. I’ve learned something without quite understanding what I’ve learned about color and preferences and messages received second hand from the distant past. Life is not just more of this and more of that. Things fit together, the parts reach for each other in ways we endeavor to understand. Even in the corner of a churchyard. Even in a random photograph.

In November of last year I wrote something about a foxglove in Crept Through the Fence that grew many feet long to squeeze through a ramshackle fence at the Yoga Center before turning heavenward and blooming. That plant has long since died and gone, but this one is for sale outside Albertsons. It’s less than two feet tall in a plastic container, very reasonably priced. It has the same color and the same markings as the one I wrote about. There was a certain chemistry, I think. We felt like old friends running into each other at the market. They are not only poisonous, as it turns out, but they also have a tendency, it seems, to produce mild but pleasant waves of insanity.

From a piece of the abandoned fence at the former Yoga Center. (See The Yoga Center and Life at the Old Yoga Center.) The right combination of sun and warmth after a good rain forced this fence to bloom and get ready to bloom and bloom again. It wasn’t something they could dig up and replant, so they left it, along with the makeshift fence. It’s not visible from the street, you have to walk down the driveway of the neighboring property and peer over trash cans. But there it is. And that’s what matters. The people have left the building, but the spirit, to some extent, remains. Namaste.

It’s a sad time of year in human terms. The poppies have grown themselves to death. It’s hard to see, but the dead zone is covered in long spike-like seed pods, which means they haven’t actually grown themselves to death, but only reached the end of their cycle. They were little blooms along the bottom of the fence when they started, green and lush with bright golden flowers. Now they’re two feet into the sidewalk and dying rapidly. But the seed pods, not the flowers or the greenery is what it was always about. The next generation of poppies. The next abundance of surprising gold. Poppies were so plentiful that we thought they would last forever. And perhaps they will, but one season at a time. We’re a lot like flowers, all of us, though we spend our time firmly believing that we’re not. We are unique, but in actuality, only one in a very long chain of life.

Things growing in a six inch gap between an old fence and the sidewalk. Some of them are very healthy California poppies. I’ve avoided taking the hundred or so photos I might have taken of beautiful poppies because I’ve taken so many already. But the seeds of last year’s poppies were knocked out on the sidewalk and swept back toward the fence. The plants were pulled up and nothing was left. They grew back as if they’ve been living there for years, which I suppose they have. The thing is, they are also the largest poppies I’ve seen so far.

So what the hell, I snapped another picture of poppies, and then one really enormous one a few feet down, and in the neighbor’s yard, a tiny one that is crinkled by comparison.

If you allowed yourself, you could see nothing but poppies all day long. Until that strange moment — it hasn’t happened yet — when there isn’t a single poppy to be found. I’m not counting the days exactly, but I am fearful that the poppies’ time is coming.

This rather unusual flower is growing under the staircase just outside my door. If I had to guess, I’d say my neighbor planted it. Whether he knew what was coming or not is something else. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a daisy-like flower with such an ornate center, or one that appears to be in black and yellow. It’s a single flower at the end of a stem that seems too long, leaning ever so slightly into the sun. It seems like the perfect plant to help decorate an ornate garden — not too much, too many, or too few. For the moment, we have exactly one.

This is the upper half of my receipt for a senior coffee at McDonalds. McDonalds is at the turnaround point of my daily walk. What you don’t see is 88¢ plus 7¢ tax, or 95¢ for a small cup of coffee. Of course, an enormous cup is $1.00 plus 8¢ tax and comes with a free refill. So it makes no sense to save 12¢ plus tax on a small cup of coffee, except that I don’t usually drink even a full cup. I savor the first half and throw the second half away. It’s hard to explain, but I seem to enjoy ordering a senior coffee. The receipt struck me as odd because when we traveled to Glendora years ago to see Amie’s mother — Amie was my girlfriend for twenty long years — I came up with excuse after excuse to wait for them at Cafe 222 while they shopped. Shopping with them was more horrible than death itself. It was a wonderful coffee house located at 222 N. Glendora Ave., and I loved the name. They also had a very engaging business card. I Googled that address a few minutes ago and discovered it has since become The Red Lounge Hookah & Crepe Cafe. Could I make that up? It’s strange how little things like the number on a receipt are capable of calling up troves of memory. If I try to remember anything about Glendora, it’s mostly bad. Though the fault may be mine and not Glendora's. But the number 222 makes me remember only warm, happy thoughts. If I could just figure out how that works and write it down, I think it would be a lesson we could all benefit from.

Could they be any more dense or any more bright? This barrage of flowers is from the front yard of a rundown house on a side street I sometimes take. It has a great deal of everything crammed into a very small space. It offers no sense of design or forethought, but the clamorous nature of the yard offers a half-dozen things to stop and notice every time I pass. This grabbed my attention — how could it not — but I noticed today that they are mostly gone. I have no idea what plant created them. They bloomed suddenly, accomplished their task, apparently, and then swiftly disappeared. We, of course, are not why they bloom. As a result, they owe us no explanation whatsoever.

I walked counter clockwise around St. Timothy’s today. Yesterday I posted a view from the northeastern corner. This is from a strip of garden next to the sidewalk on the west side just past the entrance. There must be a hundred of these that popped up out of nowhere. It made me think that I should be less predictable in my path. Flowers happen with suddenness. If you’re not there when they happen, the chances become increasingly good that you will miss them. Sometimes I see dead flowers and wonder what they were. It seems a shame. And sometimes I decide that tomorrow will be soon enough. But tomorrow, as it turns out, is frequently too late. With all the photographs I've taken this year, I have captured only a small percentage of the flowers crying out for attention. Of course, they weren’t crying out to me, exactly. They were crying out to insects. I think of myself as much more important than insects, but in fact, I am only at best a passerby. How fortunate we are that flowers bloom in places where we are able to see them.

This picture, taken in late afternoon, with just a piece of Morro Rock on the upper right, gives the impression that this hedge has two different blooms. In reality, two different hedges coexist. I would say peacefully, but they seem to be in vigorous competition. One hedge runs the entire northern side of St. Timothy’s church, until without rhyme or reason the last plant is almost the same, but different. I think of it as an accident, but a very interesting one. I’m looking over the fence on the northeastern corner. The church is directly behind the hedge, and were I to stand a bit higher, Morro Rock would be much more prominent. I thought I blocked it out, but there it is. It’s not often that you find such vigorous competition. Had they alternated these the length of the wall, I would say how clever. But this may have been nothing more than an accident.

I love the late afternoon sun. It fills every unimportant detail with life as the light slowly dies. This sign was there the whole time and I never saw it. I crossed the street at just the right moment and there it was. It called out to me. We see so little of the world. Then suddenly, the world sees us.

There’s a ladybug in this picture, reminiscent of Where’s Waldo, if you remember those books. (Hint: it's in the lower left center, partially hidden. You can double click the image for a larger one.) Waldo, by the way, was originally Wally in England, but became Waldo in the US and Canada, though that means nothing to the ladybug. It must, however, have meant something to Little Brown & Co.

I took this picture because it seemed like the plant displayed almost infinite energy. This is only a tiny portion of it, but it has so many leaves in so many variations of color that it seems almost beyond human comprehension, like the stars on a very clear night. The fact is, I only saw the ladybug as I wondered what to say about this picture. I was using Photoshop to conceal something distracting on the ground. I don't usually do that. But I did it so well that I'm no longer sure where that was. Only that it must have been somewhere near the ladybug.

I find myself wondering if on some future walk this wonderful plant will fade into the background for some equally wonderful bloom.

I was taught that there are two kinds of chlorophyll, the green and the red, and that the green is more common. But it turns out that this is a lot like saying the moon is made of green cheese. It answers the question &8212; What is the moon made of? — without actually answering it. So children are told, or were told, that the moon is made of green cheese, but they were expected to ask again later, when more able to understand. The problem being, of course, that some answers are more satisfying than others, and therefore less likely to lead to further questioning. The two colors of chlorophyll satisfied me for almost sixty years.

From the New York Times article How Does a Plant With Red Leaves Support Itself Without Green Chlorophyll?

Most plants also have other pigments: carotenoids, which usually appear yellow to orange, and anthocyanins, which are red to purple. One pigment usually dominates. So a plant with red leaves probably has higher than usual amounts of anthocyanins, Dr. Pell said. But chlorophyll is still present and at work.

And chlorophyll is green. Susan K. Pell is director of science at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The new leaves in this picture are green from chlorophyll, but the older leaves have been overcome by anthocyanin. Not exactly a household word, but apparently a reality. The chlorophyll, as she says, “is still present and at work.”

This is another accidental photograph, like the one posted in Wonder, that produced interesting results. I see it as perhaps an oil painting or a large watercolor. It says almost nothing, which is strangely difficult to achieve. It has one curving splash of color and a piece of my shopping cart in the corner. The rest is completely drab, as patches of highway and driveway are bound to be. It takes cobble stones, I think, to make a bright, happy highway, but you have to be from a place that doesn’t have cobble stones for that to be true. A good museum docent might come up with more, but that’s all I have. The artist in oil or watercolor might make things a bit less distinct, or possibly more distinct according to the medium and his inclinations. At such accidental moments where no thought takes place things truly interesting occur. Without thinking, why do you think that is?

This is a mess. But if you could respond more to the color of the flowers than the cracks in the pavement, you might find it spectacular. Almost everything else has died. The ground, the pavement and the curb offer nothing. It’s odd that this particular plant with all its potential beauty managed to survive. It should have died from neglect. But it did not grudgingly survive, as though there were no options open to it, it thrived. In the month since I took this picture it has doubled in size. In the middle of nowhere it sends out beautiful blooms in an effort, one supposes, to catch the eye of passing motorists, or the eyes of passing insects. It caught the eye of one pedestrian.

This is across the street in a garden I seldom walk past. One flower in a mess of puffy greenery. When I do pass here, it means avoiding Main Street. But every six or eight weeks I cross here for a haircut, my least favorite activity next to… Well, maybe my least favorite activity. I sort of cringe all the way to the barbershop and don’t pay much attention to the plants or flowers. I worry about the thirty minutes of inescapable barbershop conversation, and the walk uphill to the market and then, finally, home. I remember crying in the barber’s chair at age two and, I suppose, as silly as it sounds, I never recovered from that. I like feeling the stubbly ends after my hair is cut. It makes it almost worth the effort. But it seems like an enormous indignity. My dream is to have one of the servants — who obviously don’t exist — offer to trim my hair before I go out, and telling me happy stories that don’t involve alcohol or women with big tits. I feel her rubbing my shoulder now and then. I could live with that. I might even forget that first scarring haircut and feel safe and content on the walk downhill toward my inevitable shampoo. And I might remembr what I was going to say about this bright, beautiful flower in a mess of puffy greenery.

I’m guessing this is a nine by nine or ten by ten inch section of a bush I pass every day. It’s a rather large bush, which means the total number of blooms could well be in the hundreds of thousands. Each bloom is minuscule, but the number seems almost infinite. Notice that the flowers have a color range between pale lavender and white, with some of them sort of half lavender and half white. Since the flowers near the base are dark lavender with no white, I’m guessing that the petals bleach in the the sunlight. It’s a fascinating bush, but until it blooms it’s of absolutely no interest. I’ve passed it hundreds of times without once noticing it. I looked over, under and beyond it, before it transformed itself into this manic flowering machine. It’s the difference between staring at one page and writing ten pages at the same time. But anything seems possible. I’ll miss this when it’s just a bush again.

It bothers me that I used to know the name of this flower, or collection of flowers. My father used them to brighten a dull or highly controlled yard. A little here, a little there. When they’re healthy and you find them at just the right moment they form hemispheres of blue. I found this one in what I hesitate to call a garden behind a strip mall. I walk this way around the church to reach the market. This is a top down shot, obviously, and the blooming is only halfway done. So, instead of a hemisphere, it forms a ring and, I think, a very interesting one. It offers a stop before reaching the market and the noise of shopping carts and cars. It is by far the most beautiful thing happening behind the strip mall.

I found this letter in Dropbox last night, something I tried for a short time before buying more space on iCloud. The letter was to Larry or Lawrence Kurfiss, a high school friend who left in his junior year but came back to marry my former girlfriend. He went off to college with her, then to graduate school, having two children on the way, before getting divorced as we all seemed to do, and ending up in Seattle for almost the remainder of his life. Suddenly he turned up in Thailand dying from a painful variety of bone cancer. His spirits were high, but his correspondence became less and less frequent. He was heavily sedated. I never did quite understand how he ended up in Thailand, and I’m not sure when he died exactly. He simply stopped responding. The letter was never meant to be public. But in reading it again after after all this time I find that it touches on many things that still interest me and, of course, steers clear of many other things that I seldom reveal. I’ve deleted a name, added a note or two and otherwise made it ready for the internet, but except for that, the letter is as I found it. It’s long, so I invite you not to read it. But if you do, I hope your time will not be entirely wasted. I had completely forgotten it, and Larry, as things turned out, never answered.

I went downtown yesterday. It was Sunday. [The day before Memorial Day.] I can’t really remember being in town on a Sunday since Amie and I used to drive there. We sometimes took the bus, but we had to be sure we weren’t going anywhere outside the bus radius. Our favorite bookstore, though Amie worked at Barnes & Noble, was Borders. We knew the manager, many of the clerks and one or two of the café people. They had a big store with a huge selection of books that were different from those at Barnes & Noble. We almost always came home with books under our arms. At B&N you could order those and wait, but in that era you had to pay for anything ordered in advance. I think book orders sank to such a level that B&N decided to drop that policy. The café sold Seattle’s Best, which has predictably become a division of Starbucks. They sold things like espresso coffee with a small scoop of ice cream in the cup, a version of which my mother served in the 50s after bridge. I remember that because I scooped the ice cream and poured the coffee, while tucked away in the kitchen. And they gave frequent discounts. Who doesn’t love discounts? Then they announced a huge number of stores were closing. They returned what they could and transferred everything else to stores that were open mainly to sell off inventory, and then they were gone. It was the fault of massive mismanagement according to numerous business magazines sold at Barnes & Noble. After that, it was a lot easier to take the bus downtown.

My support group now consists of myself. So I had to be very careful Sunday to be at each of the bus stops in advance. There are only four buses down and four buses back on Sunday, the first is at the crack of dawn (actually later) to service those who work that day. So for non-workers there are only three. I left on the 12:42 from the Atascadero Downtown Transportation Center and came back on the 5:33 from the San Luis Obispo Transportation Center. That was my window. Miss the 12:42 and the next bus was in three hours. No point in going down only to turn around and come back. Miss the 5:33 and I’d have to walk around all night and the following day until the first bus home on Tuesday. I set multiple alarms on my phone and spent the last hour reading at the bus stop. I think I was nervous the whole time and found that I was actually sick halfway through. The American spelling of diarrhea ends in rhea, the British spelling is rhoea. According to Wikipedia it comes from from διά dia "through" and ῥέω rheo “flow". Diarrhea. Look at it. The next time you need to use this word, you still won’t remember how to spell it. I was sixty, I think, before I first included it in correspondence and have never once trusted my spelling.

At breakfast, or rather at lunch when I had breakfast, I finished the first chapter of Deer Hunting with Jesus [a Kindle Book that Larry had just sent me], propping the iPad behind my plate. Leaving Barnes & Noble I caught sight of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few by Robert B. Reich. I grabbed it and walked toward the Transportation Center. There I read the introduction and first chapter. To check the spelling of the name Bageant today, one I’m still not comfortable with — I hope it won’t be a lifetime problem (or an end of life problem) like diarrhea — I opened Deer Hunting, and since it was open, skimmed through the introduction again. The author he recommended was Michael Zweig from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I have always loved the name Stony Brook. Reich is from Berkeley. In fact, his exact position there takes up half a paragraph. I imagine Reich eats Zweig for breakfast. But you know, aside from style, which Bageant owns, the first chapter of Reich sounds a lot like Bageant’s introduction. So, I’ll keep you posted.

The summer after graduation we were between houses. The one two blocks up that we were moving to was almost but not quite finished. We lived in an apartment in Torrance for a few miserable weeks before a friend of the family gave us his house while he and his family left on extended vacation. As a very young boy I remember being a landscape helper for my father at that house, planting ivy and digging holes for larger plants. Everything was exactly as it had been, except bigger and older. It had a beautiful view of the ocean and, if you were energetic enough, you could grit your teeth and walk down to the beach and back. The house sat on a small plateau well above the street. On the front steps I read the article “Was Velikovsky right?” by Eric Larrabee. (Harper’s Magazine, August 1963 — There’s a lot to be said for Google.) Emmanuel Velikovsky was a name I learned from that article. Another thing was the word “catastrophism”, the opposite of minute change over the course of millions of years which is sometimes called gradualism, or just the way things are according to the majority. I looked out over the ocean as I read, reading about the ocean hurling itself over Europe, the land splitting apart, Venus sending giant bolts of lightening toward the Earth. I saw the ocean below rise and crush everything around me, rip the houses from the ground and… And then I got up, went inside and got something to drink. When my heart slowed down, I went back outside and read some more.

When I enrolled at Harbor College later that year I found a copy of Worlds in Collision (1950), the book that cause the initial uproar. I told you in a former email that it was dangerous to express a belief in continental drift. Well, believing anything Velikovsky said was even more dangerous. I didn’t know enough to know that as I soaked him up, nor was I on track to become an academic. I read the books available at the time. There was a huge chunk of history in them that I was not prepared to process. Old Testament history. Even now I would find it difficult. I found a hardback copy of Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960) in a used book store, a book I still refer to, or would, were it not buried in a box somewhere. It’s about the overlaying of myths and history, how information from one time and culture moves to another. The peculiar life of Akhnaton explains the life of Oedipus, and also various city names in Greece. A book that proved very useful to me. In other words, it shaped the way I think. Worlds in Collision, however, was published twice in 1950, once by Macmillan and then by Doubleday. Macmillan was the major textbook company of the era. A young astronomer, an atheist, otherwise called a scientist, named Carl Sagan lead a group that said they would withhold all their books from Macmillan and insist everyone else do the same unless Macmillan withdrew Velikovsky’s book from its list. In America, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights, they wanted Velikovsky’s book banned. It did not match the scientific consensus, and should not, therefore, be published. The Communist Revolution did similar, though harsher things. Sagan saw himself as the great arbiter of belief. He perhaps saw himself as a Kafkaesque Inquisitor or Secretary of Censorship. He did not want books written against Velikovsky, because that would involve reading his books. He wanted him and all his ideas banished. Macmillan folded the moment Doubleday stepped forward and said it would take over publishing him. I, therefore, banished Carl Sagan.

The big issue was Venus being produced out of Jupiter about fifteen centuries ago. In other words, within the memory of man. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that Jupiter was effulgent, that it produced light. It was a very small sun revolving around a much larger one, which in turn was very small. Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “Death-by-Rain” in 1950. It was included in the movie The Illustrated Man, which I saw while in the Army. It was no secret that he was writing about a Venusian planet where it rained without end. We were taught that Venus was cool and wet when we were in elementary school. By we I mean you and I. Bradbury just made it rain all the time, since the planet was perpetually covered in clouds. In other words, Bradbury based his story on “fact”. Velikovsky said that the elimination of Venus from Jupiter reduced its mass below the effulgent stage, but also hurled a forming Venus through the inner solar system as it looked for its proper orbit. In the process, it nearly ran into earth more than once. It also did odd things that suggest that gravitation works hand in had with electromagnet forces. When frozen bison were dug up in Siberia with green plants and flowers in their teeth and stomachs, it suggested that the earth had come to a staggering halt. Bison grazing in Europe had been hurled as far east as eastern Russia and then frozen in an absolute flash. They did not get there gradually over millions of years. Velikovsky, of course, was not a scientist. He was a doctor of medicine, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst who devoted most of his life to doing research, unlike Richard Dawkins who had his degree in Biology and was Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science — in other words, a narrowly educated scientific hitman. Velikovsky believed Venus had caused among other things this sudden stoppage and used myth among other anathema to “prove” his case. He said that Venus, being a new planet, having been ejected from the bowels of a larger one, less than two millennia ago, would be hot. It has not had anywhere near enough time to become cool and stable. Venus being hot was the ravings of a non-scientific idiot. You could read almost anywhere that it was cool and wet. But when we got there via the space program and found the surface temperature to be well over 864° Fahrenheit, Carl Sagan actually claimed that 864° Fahrenheit isn’t all that hot. We can easily imagine places with higher temperatures. The fact that lead melts on the surface didn’t bother him in the least. In other words, he lied for the cause of science and made lots of money.

J—, whom you may remember from high school, raised his voice in my living room to drown out any discussion of Velikovsky when he visited as a doctoral candidate in Physics. There wasn’t anything wrong with Velikovsky, everything was wrong, so wrong that he refused to allow any discussion of him. He did something similar when I tried to discuss Louis Charpentier a few years later, concerning the building and placement of cathedrals in France. I was reading him in an original French edition. He hadn’t yet been translated. Basically, they just put them wherever they wanted to, and there is nothing special about how they were built. And that was the end of that conversation. I was pleased to see that [the late] Norma Lorre Goodrich [“a prolific author and former professor at the University of Southern California and Claremont Colleges” — see her website] quotes freely from Charpentier in The Holy Grail. Scientists attend a sort of Catechism before they are granted holy robes. They are taught to fine tune the catechetical points, but not to question them, and to make sure no one else does either. The fact that Newton wrote more about Alchemy than he did about gravitation or calculus was absolute nonsense. If such works exist, then someone was pretending to be Newton. Now, most of a lifetime has passed and Gary Lachman in The Secret Teachers of the Western World devotes considerable space to Newton and Alchemy, explaining that science has become so powerful as to convince people that Newton despised such nonsense. But there it is, just don’t expect a doctorate in science, though I suppose you could still get one in Medicine, if you believe it.

Books and ideas. Books, ideas and memories. The fact that they are still alive and well inside me speaks, I think, against the triviality of reminiscence. Sitting on a borrowed porch reading, and imagining… I remember the back door of the laundry room on Elm Street, the secret entrance to the attic in a the guest closet, and the peach tree behind the decorative fence in the back yard. But these and a million other things are isolated and disconnected. They lack the structure of books and ideas, though like Alchemy I have much more of them than I do of calculus and gravitation. The active life is one of selection and emphasis. We do the best we can with what we have, and I think that when we reach the end, there will be much left to do. We will wonder why we did so little. Or maybe we will wonder why there was so much to do in the first place. And we will try to narrow down the questions to something manageable. And then, perhaps, we will remember.

Visible here is ivy of some sort, one nasturtium leaf and one nasturtium flower squeezing through a crack in the fence. What you don’t see is that all this is happening about four feet from the ground. The ivy has come over the top, which is not unusual, but the nasturtium has squeezed through of the fence. It’s a rare spectacle that seems to defy logic. The nasturtium seems to be growing out of thin air, unless there’s a flower pot hanging behind the fence. I don’t have access to the other side, so I suppose we’ll never know, but I find it amazing, even if there’s a magic trick that for the moment baffles us. One way or the other, doesn't it actually make the fence?

This is as pretty as one flower need ever be. It has shape, color and mild irregularity, without which it would seem artificial. But not the irregularity of sloppiness or defect. The irregularity of perfection. I think kindergarteners understand this better than adults. They paint each petal better or more cursorily than the next. Each one different. Each one the same. In the end, a perfect flower. I’m sure I’ve taken numerous pictures of this flower and found different things to say about it. But when the light changes, so does everything. This was the first picture I took of this flower… today.

Cactus has a sense of permanence about it. It grows slowly and is seemingly untouchable. But every so often when we’re not looking it pushes forth a new cycle of growth. Not the kinds of buds one is tempted to touch, nor the kind of plant one tends to reach into. But nonetheless, when the time is right, cactus continues.

Lovable it is not, though not all new growth is cute and cuddly, its unlikely nature amazes us. Just when you though it was old and done, at least well past its prime, it turns out to be youthful and procreative. Not inviting exactly, but interesting. Perhaps if I lived for hundreds of years, rather than a handful, this would seem normal to me. But I don’t, and it doesn’t. These creatures will live until I am well forgotten. And yet, in a strange way, they will still be young.

When I see flowers as exotic as this one on my walk, unless there’s a hundred of them in the same place, I think that only recently they came from a nursery. They come in six-packs with plastic tags showing the flowers to expect. Once they flower, it’s not certain if they’ll be there next year. The flower, after all, isn’t everything. The plant itself has to fit the garden. The plastic tags seldom tell you what the plant itself will be. A container garden, one consisting of plants in pots, can afford to try almost thing out, watch it grow, and then find a replacement if necessary. But the rules for a garden in the ground are somewhat different. You want the space to grow and be beautiful between flowerings. So the flower is the cherry on the ice cream sundae, as it were, to stick to the exotic theme. But the ice cream itself is still the treat. Many of us set the cherry aside and accept it as mere decoration. Flowers are difficult to put aside, but an ugly plant is much easier to dig up and replace than a beautiful one. Beautiful plants call for other measures. As you can see, this concept isn’t exactly clear. It consists mostly of gray areas interrupted by beautiful, exotic flowers. But all this passed before my mind as I stood and considered this flower that will probably not be there next year. I suspect the gardener will find something more predictable, dependable, easier. Though, for the moment, isn’t it absolutely beautiful?

It looks like it’s struggling, perhaps for water, but not giving up. It has found an entrance to the earth and that’s all, or almost all, it takes. Across the sidewalk is a larger, healthier bunch of white, lavender and purple flowers of exactly this type. My guess, and it seems obvious, is that last year’s seed found it’s way across the sidewalk and into a crack. Another guess, and it's just as obvious, is that this is a one in a thousand shot, but that’s how plants work. If they grow fast enough and long enough they can tear holes in the concrete, split the seams of old and new and go right on surviving. No excuse me, no pardon me, just a little here, a little there, and a seemingly impossible journey back to the world completely covered in greenery, when all this paving for cars and trucks and pedestrians is no longer done because… Well, plants don’t really care why. They care to survive, to return next season and evermore. We should be so patient.

That should be obvious. They grow wherever they are. And sometimes they turn out to be the most advanced, the most beautiful and certainly the most memorable things we find.

This, I suppose, is what the welcome mat looks like when the welcome itself has worn thin. A nation of immigrants where the Fourth of July is meant to be celebrated by all. But a land where many of the people whose parents or grandparents arrived not long ago want nothing more than to declare themselves true Americans and exclude all others. Ripping babies from their mothers' arms and declaring them criminals, deporting thirty year peaceful residents, even those with green cards, because they can, banning people according to their religion. These and a list of other things with distressing levels of support are happening as I write. But no matter what your political or economic views, no matter what your age, race or other demographics, somewhere deep down inside you must know these things are un-American and wrong.

I remember a lady I didn’t much like who had no education, no skills and nothing of any true value saying, “At least I’m white.” It was her claim to superiority. Of course, she said that to other whites who nodded in agreement. Her grandfather, who came to this country in steerage and still spoke with an accent, apparently did so in order to allow his family to bellow that they were not only white, but true Americans. Two things that made her and those she spoke to superior.

And it’s easy to say that she was just ignorant, but what percentage of our population is just as ignorant? Is the problem prejudice or is prejudice simply a side effect of ignorance? We have way too much ignorance in this country, and there are those in power who benefit from that ignorance. But do we build walls or put up fences or take people's rights away to protect these true Americans from intelligent and humanitarian urges — one might say American urges — so they don't have to rub shoulders with people of color, or people with different customs and languages and thereby polute their whiteness and their status as true Americans? Are we really obliged to do these things so the ignorant may safely believe that they are something they are not?

If you want to know what the Fourth of July is, go to almost any park in Los Angeles, the area where I grew up, and you will find the parks filled with Mexican immigrants eating fried chicken from takeout buckets — it's a really big day for takeout chicken — and waving American flags. The parks will be packed today, unless they’re afraid to go there. Go to the homes of recent immigrants and see if this isn’t their favorite holiday. And then remember that Mexican's are mostly gang members and rapists, and that anyone with skin less than white or anyone who carries a book other than the Bible is someone to be feared, someone we must protect ourselves from. And then ask yourself which are the immigrants and which are the Americans.

I’m sorry, believe me, I'm sorry to write this today. It would be nice to celebrate the Fourth of July, as I did growing up, with barbecued steaks and a burst of patriotism, but how do patriotism and exclusion work together in a land of — I can't say this enough — immigrants? My father’s parents came here from the old country. My mother’s parents came from an old Tennessee family, but their great-grandparents were poor farmers who arrived here with nothing but the will to survive and the desire to be Americans. What does it mean to be truly American? How do we open our arms to the world and yet say to the poor and the weary stay out or go back where you came from?

From the inside looking out. Halfway to peaches. If indeed they are peaches. They could be almost anything, but they certainly look like peaches. When I was a boy we had a peach tree hidden behind a screen that defined an area for a hammock, a dining table and some benches. It was a beautiful yard. Behind another screen was the incinerator. I wonder if anyone remembers those. We used to burn the trash in a concrete incinerator, before garbage disposals and universal trash pickup. Now, of course, trash is a multitiered event with various types and styles of trash, though it’s still everything we get rid of.

Anyway, the peach tree didn’t do much most of the year. I’m not really sure why my father planted it. I don’t remember us having peaches for desert or sitting at the outdoor table savoring peaches. What I remember was that suddenly the branches became very heavy and curved toward the ground because the peaches were so large and lush that the tiny tree could barely support them. Then I remember birds flocking to eat fallen peaches. It was a kind of hiding place for me, the space behind the screen. But I remember the smell and the utter waste of things that were just what grew in the yard. We could have picked baskets of them and offered them to passersby, and maybe talked to them about what a beautiful day it was or how big the peaches were. But I honestly believe that people — at least the people then and there — preferred to buy their food at the grocery store where they knew its history, at least as far back as the boxes it arrived in.

But things have changed. Everything changes. In reality, however, everything is exactly the same. Peaches still burst forth from tiny branches, the branches bend toward the earth, and the birds are happy.

A week or so after I took the picture for Alone and Perfect, I took this one. This magnificent flower appears to close up at night. While probably not the same exact flower, it was close enough, and now looks somewhat forlorn. I remembered the word “heliotropic” from high school, but this probably wasn’t the same process as following the sun. But the more I tried to remember, the more I seemed to recall that that’s exactly what we were taught. I could swear the teacher explained to us that sunlight holds the flower open using the same mechanism as heliotropism. Alas, Elizabeth Palermo, Associate Editor of LiveScience says the process is called “nyctinasty”, explaining that “In cool air and darkness, the bottom-most petals of certain flowers grow at a faster rate than the upper-most petals, forcing the flowers shut.” She also offers the opinion that such flowers are more highly evolved than those that do not close, citing Charles Darwin and others. So, I've remembered the word “heliotropic” for more than fifty years but have to sound out “nyctinasty”, which I won't remember five minutes from now. Either they didn’t understand this when I was in high school or else someone’s making things up. Either the flowers grow shut or else the process that holds them open loses its force. I think I prefer the incorrect answer.

This plant is in the front yard of a young couple with a recent baby. They have worked very hard to make their yard beautiful. Whether that had anything to do with the nesting instinct I haven’t figured out, but they have what I think should be called a rather dramatic taste in plants. Each plant being carefully focused, and carefully placed. This one seems like a kind of space monster, small at this point, saving up energy to devour to the town. It is as beautiful and precise as the garden itself. But I can’t help wondering if after their delightful baby reaches the toddler stage and begins disassembling things to compare the surface to the interior, or whyever toddlers tear things apart, if they will ever again see the edges of this plant in quite the same light as they did when they planted it.