The tulips on the counter beckon "love me love me love me" as they open and release their scent.
Yesterday, K and I talked of our families. She showed me personally-inscribed black and white pictures of people shaking hands. "To my close friend. Harry S. Truman" "To my friends at the card table." I said that M's apartment-complex had good sounds: people practicing the piano and cooking together. [There was an elder woman who sat at her window facing the courtyard sunning her bare chest while reading. 2013.12.06 the tulips look like her.] I said the Monet had different temporal registers: the peaches on the table vs. the pitcher vs. the child to the left in blue-shade vs. the women walking past.
In Looking (2012) John Updike wrote Monet "paints nature in her nudity"; Sargent is "too facile"; Andrew Wyeth is "heavily hyped."
1971: "He weeds until he begins to see himself as a weed and his hand with its ugly big moons on the fingernails as God's hand choosing and killing, and then he goes inside the house and looks into the refrigerator and eats a carrot raw."
Later, I squat in the dusk to look at a baby snake in the middle of the path and notice a bee feeding on it. Two people sat in this very spot and looked over the haze to the ocean. A man passes carrying his daughter close to his chest. He plays her soft music. I look back towards them to see if they, too, will kneel towards the snake.