Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Our pool didn’t get opened until August, which cut out at least half of the summer season, so we are extending for as long as possible – hence at least one dip per day, weather-permitting. I love when summer lingers, and I intend to do the dip until October. Having said that, there will probably be snow next week, but that’s 2020.

These days the pool is a delightfully fragrant place to be, surrounded by a Brugmansia in full bloom and a seven sons flower tree also filled with blossoms. At night, they turn their perfume up to ten, and with the numbers of blooms it fills the entire yard. On the surface of the pool, the perfume floats like the falling flowers from the seven sons tree. It’s worth the pain of fishing them out with the pool net for their brief prettiness, not unlike the cherry blossom petals that would normally fill the pool in May (when there is water in it).  We missed out on that this year, so the falling of these flowers is a late-season recompense. 

Sometimes the universe gives you a second chance. 

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…