Around Here

I got my first mosquito bite of the season yesterday, on the outside edge of my  pinky finger, left hand. You know the spot. It's a favorite with mosquitoes. The  bite itched intensely for a few minutes, then disappeared. It's been said that air conditioning and mosquito control made year-round living in  Florida possible. But the little salt-water mosquitoes down here are wimpy  wannabees compared to the blood-sucking vampire helicopters up north. We used  to come in covered with bites, one big welt, from a tramp in the Michigan woods  of my boyhood. Limbs splashed with the carnage of battle. My friend Gary used to  let one alight on his arm, then stretch his skin so taught around it that it couldn't  pull its proboscis out. He'd watch it fill up with blood until it exploded. Or so he told  me. I tried it. The sucker filled up to massive dimensions... and then flew away.  I'm still pretty gullible. That was quite the bite. But mosquitoe...

Marvin's Room is a play that is popular with community theater. The 1996 movie had an outstanding cast led by Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Diane Keaton, Robert DeNiro and Hume Cronyn. Here's my revue of a local production: The late playwright Scott McPherson’s comedy hit “Marvin’s Room,” continues its run at Cultural Park Theatre for two more weekends. The wrenching, and often grotesquely funny play about family dysfunction and upheaval, takes on the subject of how families care for their terminally ill, and ultimately, one another. McPherson had a composer’s knack for pastiche, and stitched together a crazy quilt that entwines chaos and comfort. In director Leo Wolfe’s production, the pastiche of McPherson’s comedy is formalized and restated in the set design: two panels of quilts are suspended in a layered backdrop that suggest comfort in the midst of impending mortality. Pieces of realistic sets, a kitchen, a living room, a back yard at night, are woven into, and out ...

The New Yorker sent me another final notice that my subscription had run out. I have a pile of unread issues, mixed approximately 5:1, a literary martini, with my unread Harper's'. I'll grab an issue, March, August, whatever, from time to time, and tote it to bathroom or beach. I enjoy seeing, in passing, that stack of magazines, its reassuring height, still growing, ever more slowly, but still a bit faster than my ability or inclination to consume.

My laelia flowered with a rush this year. Just a week from the first blossom, every bud had climbed out of its sheath and opened, all thirty nine, her new personal best. I was concerned; a posse of mealybugs had swept into our peaceful niche last winter. They had penetrated down into the new growth, a cottony sticky invasion. But the plant was strong. I treated it with insecticidal soap. Foliage growth wasn't as robust this year, but she's really smiling now. I had to pinch out a few flowers that had gotten chewed in the bud. She's beginning to outgrow her clay pot, I should divide her this summer. Her lily-0f-the-valley/lilac scent arises with the morning sun.