Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

There will come a day when the children of the world will ask what you and I were doing at this point in history. Your daughters and sons, our nieces and nephews, and your grandsons and granddaughters will one day be old enough to look at where we are right now. They will see us with adult eyes and judgment, and what they think will depend largely on what we are putting into action at the present moment. They will search back for our FaceBook histories, our Tweets, and our Instagram posts. They will question how the world ever came to such a point and what was it like and what exactly did we do. They will see exactly what we did, and more importantly what we didn’t do at such a perilous crux.

Did we say anything?

Did we stay silent?

Did we post nonsense about both sides of the political story while the world burned and died around us?

How will you be able to answer them?

I struggle with that question. I’m trying to do everything I can do, but I’m sure I’m not.

One thing of which I am sure, and of which there is ample evidence, is that I did not remain silent, and I never have. Since 2016 I’ve been vocal about my absolute resistance and disgust at Donald Trump as President. I stand firmly against him and all that he represents. All the racist behavior and support, all the division and strife, all the lies and lack of helping America while a million (and counting) of our citizens died from COVID, all the hypocrisy and hatred he spews, all the disrespect and dishonor he has shoveled onto our military heroes, and all the selfish rounds of golf he played while our country crumbled in the eyes of the entire world. I stand against it all, and I proclaim it here and now for all future generations to see and witness.

Where do you stand?

During the seventeen years this website has been in existence, it’s gone through several revamps. For the first few, I simply rebooted everything, wiped the site clean, and started all over again, without caring to chronicle or archive or save anything. It was the right decision at the time, and quiet honestly I’m still ok with it, but every once in a while I wish I’d thought to hang onto those posts, so I could see what mad mischief I may have been up to in 2003.

In 2012, Skip helped me do the most major overhaul of things, and I held onto a few special posts from 2010 onward, which is where we were until a couple of days ago, when I pressed the ‘Update’ button on WordPress and promptly crashed the site since it hadn’t been updated in years. (I am the creative side of this whole process; I don’t do HTML code.) It took a week for the host to restore things, and along the painstaking route they had to take to get here, we lost a few posts, including the amazing one that went with these pool pics. It seemed a shame to waste them, so here they are in all their gratuitous glory. 

As for all the content that has come to collect in the past eight years, there is quite a bit, and it’s a diary and project unto itself when take in its entirety. There’s something very burdensome about that. As much as I’m glad all the messiness is down in some format, the truth is that I don’t revisit the past as much as all the links I post might pretend. It holds you back. It weighs you down. It prohibits unfettered forward motion. To that end, it’s almost time to revamp again, and I’m still trying to decide whether to hold onto all these odds and ends, or let them all go and start anew. There are glories in both. 

Meditating for 24 minutes a day is apparently not quite enough for me, at least according to the universe, which told me to slow down even more. When I went to update this WordPress website, an update about seven years overdue (whoopsie daisy!), it promptly crashed everything while trying to catch up on a bazillion upgrades. After a morning on hold with the hosting service, they gave me a ticket number and said that someone would be in touch. Rather than fall apart and freak out, I put my head in my hands for a moment, took a deep breath, and understood that the universe was telling me to slow down, to take a couple of days off from blogging, to savor the sunny day for who knew how many we would have left?

I walked out to the front yard and began dividing the three peony bushes that I planted about eighteen years ago. They hadn’t been touched in all that time, and since this is the moment to move and divide peonies, the opportunity was at hand. The sun was warm as I worked. Sweat dripped off my face and I shuddered at the thought of what my hair might have become. Mostly though, I didn’t care. It felt good to be outside in the sun. The work of dividing the thick, tuberous roots was tougher than I expected. Almost two decades of feeding these plants and amending their soil had turned them into impressive clumps, it required some muscle to divide and re-plant them into six smaller plants. Once done, I cleaned up the sidewalk and hosed it down, giving the front-yard a more refined look than it’s had in a decade. That never would have happened if I’d sat inside trying to update a website.

Eight days later, and a number of phone calls to the hosting company, I finally snapped the whip and got them to take notice of their poor service and restore it without their customary fee, so here we finally are. This should see us through the fall and the holidays – beyond that is up to the universe. Here’s a recap to bring you back up to speed with a few posts that might have gone missing…

A little bit of autumn in August.

A cicada day.

24.

The monarchy rules.

Lilac brocade.

Summer ravaged like a virgin.

Mocktail magic.

Sun of a flower.

There is no in-between.

Hunks of the Day included Jordy and Ross Butler. 

Last summer stole the song that would have been perfect for this post, so we must make do with another. Something new is always better here anyway. As for the featured sunflower photo, it was grabbed right after my first dinner with Skip since we all socially isolated in March. That’s way too long to be out of touch with a good friend, and it was a wonderful reunion on a beautiful summer evening. On our way to the cars, we passed this sunflower – a spectacular embodiment of the summer – slightly drooping, slightly crestfallen, slightly worse for wear, but still blooming, still coming to fruition, still hanging on to its ragged prettiness. It winked, it smiled, and it closed the evening with the secret beauty that only opens up when you give Schenectady a chance. We made plans to do another dinner in a couple of weeks. 

When I arrived back home, the night had made its entrance, and with it the cooler temperatures that mark this transitional time of the year. Not quite ready for them, I plunged into the pool out of sheer defiance, willing that the saga of summer continue. We need a few more weeks yet, and have vowed to keep the pool heated and going until October. There are often a few 80-degree days that come after everyone has closed up pool shop for the season, so we are hoping to capture a few of them this year, especially considering our late start.

Fall whispers, but I’m not quite ready to listen. 

A Friday night calls for some mocktail magic, in this case a simple grapefruit spritzer with the twist of the real deal, and the light of a slanting afternoon sun. It’s a simple thing of some Half and Half Grapefruit/Lemon soda (no sugar added) and some plain seltzer to dry it down a bit. Not very exciting, so we employ the light show to gussy it all up. 

So much of life is about finding the right lighting. More people need to realize that. The world would be a prettier place.

The world should be a prettier place. 

It’s my unfortunate opinion that the brilliant soundtrack and original source novel made for much better experiences than the movie version of ‘The Virgin Suicides‘ – but even coming in a ghostly third to those artistic endeavors is no small feat, considering what lofty achievements they were and remain. 

“They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The novel is haunting in the most gorgeously powerful ways. It’s remained in my memory for all these years because it had such a profound effect on me when it first came out, one of those few touchstone moments when the words or a writer coincide almost too perfectly with what you’re going through at the time, what you’re trying to work out, what you’re trying to survive. 

It seems wrong that summer should be so dark some days, but so it is. 

The music from the film, especially this cut ‘Playground Love’ is the epitome of summer dreaminess. It’s so dreamy you might not even realize how seductively it has pulled you beneath the surface of the pool, so gorgeous does it sound, so velvet-like are its caresses… and your body dares not even choke on the warm bubbly water. It pulls you down to the bottom by your very sex, sucking all of you in such devilishly delicious ways you don’t even notice you’re drowning.

The world looks mottled like a Monet when you’re on the bottom of the pool looking up. 

These days I float placidly on the surface, diving down only in controlled and contained bursts of exploration. But I remember the days of drowning. I remember the days of tragedy. I remember the days without love.

“Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The first monarch butterfly we’ve seen this year arrived yesterday morning, flitting about the weeping cup plants, reaching the end of their spectacular season. Unstated and unwatered, they have taken to flopping about a bit, another victim of my ennui with 2020 and shameful lack of tending to certain stalwart plants. I’ll be better to them next year, plan their stakes earlier, and cultivate their roots with more regular watering. For now, they have been good enough to perform without much care from my end. And yesterday they drew in our cherished monarch.

An undeniable signal of the end of summer, we used to see them on our fall visits to Ogunquit, happily pausing in their migration and swarming the cosmos and asters along the gardens by the Marginal Way. Beauty upon beauty upon beauty…

They know their light, waiting for the precise time of the year when the afternoon sun is at its most glorious, and the sky at its deepest blue. Then their stained-glass kaleidoscopic wing pattern lights up in breathtaking fashion, and their show steals the end of the summer season.

It is indeed a grand finale. 

May the show go on for a few more weeks at least…

The buzzing of a lawn mower. 

The buzzing of a leaf blower.

The buzzing of a motorcycle.

Such are the sounds of a summer day this year.

The buzzing of the cicadas was also there, joining in the summer song, and though they sounded from high in the trees, they were closer than all those other sounds. 

They haven’t been singing as much this year. Or maybe I simply didn’t notice them. During the long stretch of 90 degree days we had earlier in the summer, I mostly stayed indoors. Maybe the cicadas sang all their songs then. Now, with less than a week to go before September arrives, I listen to them singing on an afternoon overflowing with sun. 

It slants through the foliage of ferns and dogwood leaves, and it is already different than it was in July. Some of its potency has faded. When a cloud obscures it, the warmth instantly departs, unlike high summer, when it held on even through gray and overcast skies. Floating in the pool, I notice the air is cooler than the water. It’s the late August shift that sneaks in through the nights, finally starting to seep into the days. As seen in the browning tips of the ferns, there is no going back now, no way to return to the fresh green of an earlier time, the youth of a season. We have already lost that. 

Still, summer lingers. As the sun descends further, the angel’s trumpet begins its own song – a song of scent – and its sweet lemony perfume soon fills the poolside patio as its pendulous peach-colored blooms dangle high in the air. 

More buds are forming on its ever-expanding branches, further proof that summer has always insisted on staying through September. Since we got such a late start to having an open pool, we will take summer’s lead and keep it heated through October, savoring every last drop of sunshine shimmering on the water, drawing out the season for as long as possible. We will push fall deeper into winter, hoping to lessen the severity and duration of both. The angels are behind us. They will make it possible. 

The buzzing of the cicadas plays on. It is the soundtrack to summer, no matter how strange and upside-down the world feels.

Summer will have its say.

Summer will have its stay. 

The weekly recap is a day late due to yesterday’s birthday festivities, low-key though they may have been. So now, without any further ado, because we are all out of ado, here’s what went down in the previous week (and a day). 

It began with a batch of dill dip. 

Michelle Obama gave one of the most powerful speeches of my lifetime. 

A simple hard truth.

Don’t blame me for this fail; I tried to buy a pillow.

A gratuitous Hump Day post with some shirtless male celebrities. 

Fiery starbursts.

Do you like to swallow?

Moody summer days by the pool.

Some more sunbursts.

Tiny wisdom.

The blaring call of the angel’s trumpet.

Mock-up of a margarita.

A harlequin twenty years ago.

The drama of a summer caftan.

A trickster never returns, because a trickster never really leaves.

My 45th birthday. 

Birthday suit vintage.

Hunks of the Day included Bruno Alcantara, Glenn McCuen, Big Dipper, and Michael Yerger.

So what if nobody came? I’ll have all the ice cream and tea,

And I’ll laugh with myself, and I’ll dance with myself,

And I’ll sing, ‘Happy birthday to me!’ – Shel Silverstein

Behind the birthday-suited body in these sepia-shaded photographs from the distant past is the beginning of a Thuja ‘Steeplechase’ hedge which I planted in the early years of our home. Today, that group of shrubs towers above us, providing privacy and protection, and a home for birds. There are a lot of years in those Steeplechases. 

There are also a lot of years in this body, so I’ve been making some efforts to take better care of it, both the interior and the exterior. I’m even getting around to taking care of the ultra-interior. I’m not talking colonoscopy yet, but rather the inner-workings of the mind. Culling from the past – a past that finds its way to the surface on this day of all days – and the delicate observations that result, brings a certain peace after a certain tumult. It’s a similar feeling of relief and release that comes after a hard cry or tough argument. Maybe it’s the same sort of unburdening that comes after an entire year of living through one more spin around the sun. 

I’m expecting this 2020 birthday to be slightly shaded with melancholy. How could it not be given all that’s been happening in the world? To be honest, at some point in every birthday there is usually a moment tinged with contemplative somberness, a point at which I pause in mournful reverence. Birthdays have always been a strange combination of celebration and ending. Coinciding with the almost-end of summer, the end of summer vacation, and the end of another year on earth, they were a time of reflection, and because I was never one to enjoy big birthday parties and crowded birthday get-togethers, I often felt intentionally alone and quiet on this day. 

At 45 years of age, I am finally embracing that as my baseline and preference. It took all that time to be fully comfortable in my skin, to be ok with being quiet and reserved, to not being the star attraction or mirrorball around which the party revolves. That realization is a birthday gift of its own. 

It takes a long time to grow young. ~Pablo Picasso

Let’s not talk about birthdays in a time of a worldwide pandemic.

Let’s not talk about birthdays in the crazy-ass year of our Lord 2020.

Let’s not talk about birthdays in the way they suppress and bind us to a social-construct of age in carefully measured hours and days without care or concern for any measure of wisdom or grace or humility.

Instead, let’s talk about a birthday that arrives like the top of a mountain after a long journey. I thought I’d look around and be able to see the whole world from here, when in fact there’s so much fog I can barely see through to yesterday. More surprising is that above the fog line is not a clear vista, only more mountaintops, some even higher than the one I’ve spent months climbing. I can choose to do this all over again, to climb to higher points, or simply different points. I can also shatter the traditional paths and hop right onto a staircase of clouds, bouncing from bank to bank, only to find what looked so soft and solid and sure dissipate the closer I got to it.

Maybe I would step onto a gale and let it fling me into a cold rain.

Maybe I would grab a strike of lightning and all its jagged, angular energy.

Maybe I would hitch a ride on the rising sun, or latch onto the falling moon, or swing a lasso of stars to capture passage to another galaxy.

Or maybe I’ll simply stay where I am, at the end of a year’s journey around the sun, and the dawn of another trip around its orbit. It feels like I am standing in a very different place. A frightening place. An exhilarating place. A promising place. And a better place.

A place where I’m a little more sure of myself, and in ways that are genuinely healthier and more enjoyable than poses of the past. A place where I can admit the many ways I’ve been wrong, the ways I’ve been mistaken, the ways I’ve failed and faltered. A place where if I may not be able to fully embrace the imperfect, I can at least acknowledge and make motions to move toward embracing it. A place where I can work on forgiveness, and work on saying when I’m sorry.

This isn’t a place that’s fixed in any singular location or time, it occupies neither space nor history, and maybe that’s why I never got a glimpse of it until recently ~ and I’ve only had the briefest of glimpses. To be fair, I’m not even entirely sure of what exactly I’ve seen, but there is wisdom in that; knowledge of what you lack is always more important than knowledge of what you think you already have. 

In these last few months, when I’ve been more alone than ever ~ as we have all been ~ I realized the scary and liberating sense that we may have to be on our own, that being alone and finding solace in solitude is not only about survival, it’s about growth, about becoming something better, finding purpose, and finding meaning. Not everyone is going to understand or want to be a part of it. That’s ok. Love is sometimes about letting go, even of the people you thought would be with you for life. Because they will be ~ at least, they can be, if you allow it, if you learn how to hold them in your heart. If that means letting some of them go, that’s not necessarily an ending. And when you understand that, it’s less sad and sorrowful, and more of a reason to find the joy that remains. In some circumstances, a greater love will reveal itself, as the closer we get to truth and freedom, the closer we get to love.

Everybody wants a happy ending ~ and we seem to believe it’s the ending part that is most important. We seek out some sort of definitive resolution, some finale that ties up all the loose ends and wraps everything up in a pretty bow. I think we have it backward ~ it’s the happy that should matter most, not the ending. At the ripe age of 45, I’m only beginning to find that happiness in those loose ends, in the unresolved tensions of a day, in the messy unfinished chaos that means we have another day to make everything better. It means that we are alive, that we are still here, still making mistakes in the muck. And it is a most beautiful muck…

Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears. ~ John Lennon