The House of God

This is the church I attended as a child. Yes, despite the fact that I'm now an atheist with Buddhist leanings, I grew up in a Christian environment -- Presbyterian, to be specific. It's a pretty church, isn't it? The stucco Spanish style is quite distinctive. I drove past yesterday just to see how it's looking these days.

So many things happened in this building. When my brother and I were really young, we went every week to Sunday School and then the first part of the main service, after which children were adjourned to the nursery. Only our parents had to endure the sermon. (And in my case, only my mother -- I don't remember my father ever accompanying us to church, though he did on rare occasions like our baptisms, which were done in infancy.)

My younger brother and I would sit in the pews and draw on the paper church programs -- dinosaurs (me) and cars (my brother). Were we absorbing a spiritual message? Maybe, in some general sense. Every week our minister worked Peanuts, the comic strip, into the service, using it to deliver a moral lesson, and I always looked forward to the Peanuts part. (Only years later did I realize these messages came from, or were at least inspired by, a best-selling book.)

As a young teenager, I took a special class to learn all about the basics of the church in order to be confirmed. That class met in the room you see on the right, with the two windows. I also met with a group there to discuss becoming a teenager, where we read from a book by -- believe it or not -- James Dobson, in which he discussed topics like puberty. I don't remember Dobson's message being particularly strident or conservative, but I specifically remember a passage in which he wrote that girls would become attracted to boys, "their strength and their muscles," and boys would be attracted to girls, "their curves and their softness." I remember thinking, "Hmmmm...muscles!"

Here I am with the cast of a church play. I'm in the bright striped robe, which I really liked. The big stuffed dog was our "fatted calf." I think I was an innkeeper. I don't really remember.

This might be the church youth group, with which I did lots of activities. We went to movies, including Neil Simon's "California Suite," which can get quite bawdy and probably gave our youth-group leaders severe heartburn. We went to Malibu Grand Prix, a local video game and car-racing emporium, where I once forgot my brand-new winter coat -- we were driving home when I realized it, and fearing my mother's wrath I actually cried, forcing the youth group leaders to turn the van around. I got the coat back.

Church was primarily a constructive social outlet for my family. Despite the weekly message that the gospels were real, I never felt expected to literally believe every word of the Bible -- especially farfetched ideas like the virgin birth. My mom leaned toward interpreting the Bible metaphorically. I followed her lead.

And then, when I was a teenager, a funny thing happened. All my friends stopped coming to church. I eventually wound up in a Sunday School class where I was the only kid. And then I got a job at McDonald's, and began working on Sundays, and that was that. No more church. (Maybe Christmas and Easter, with my mom, for old time's sake.)

I appreciate the fact that we went -- I think we did benefit from the friendly social environment and emphasis on kindness. I even returned to various churches a few times as an adult, despite never quite buying, literally, the spirituality. I don't really miss it now, I have to say -- but it was nice to drive past the building again. In these polarized times, I hope the message is still moderate, forgiving and positive.

Surf Jargon

Well, I made it to Florida. The flight was long, as usual, but uneventful. I didn't have talkers sitting next to me, thank God.

I had a window seat, but I only looked outside a couple of times -- these days, with everyone peering at seatback video screens, it seems taboo to travel with your window shade up. Remember how people used to fly with plenty of daylight in the cabin, looking outside, watching the clouds and whatnot? Nowadays we all fly sealed inside a dark tube of fuselage.

I read all nine-plus hours, which was great. I polished off three issues of The New Yorker and I've almost finished William Finnegan's surfing memoir. As I've said, I'm really enjoying this book, even though it's full of passages like this:

Jeffreys is rocky but not especially shallow. It's a facey wave, a broad canvas for sweeping long-radius turns, including cutbacks toward the hook. It's fast and it's powerful but it's not particularly hollow -- it has no bone-crushing sections a la Kirra. Some waves have flat sections, or weird bumps, or go mushy; others close out. The rule, however, is a reeling wall, peeling continuously for hundreds of yards. My pale blue New Zealand pintail loved that wave. Even at double-overhead, dropping in against the wind, it never skittered.

Now, even knowing that Jeffreys and Kirra are surfing locales and his New Zealand pintail is a favorite board, I have only the vaguest idea what he's talking about with all that surf jargon. But I suspect he's mining it for the poetry of the language. (He mentions writing another book, about railroading, that his editor complained was too full of jargon, and he made just that case for keeping the jargon in.) Anyway, you can imagine just enough of the action to keep it interesting, and most of the book is more generally descriptive of places and personalities.

I'm mostly just jealous of his experiences, traveling around the world for months on end, working odd jobs and selling magazine articles to get by and move on to the next wave. He drove coast-to-coast with a friend as a 16-year-old, and traipsed around Europe with his girlfriend just after graduating from high school. The practical, suburb-dweller side of my brain keeps thinking: "Where are you getting enough money for all this? What about health insurance? How did you talk your parents into allowing you to go?"

Completely unrelated: Why do airlines still give transatlantic customers little underperforming toothbrushes and tubes of yucky toothpaste? Does anyone really use them?

(Photo: Wild poinsettia in my dad's yard.)

Bird Juice

Our garden fox showed up again yesterday morning, and seemed very interested in our bird bath.

Olga loves the bird bath, too. She loves to drink from it, which never fails to gross me out, especially since no matter how often I freshen the water it's always disgusting. Dave and I call it "bird juice."

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that "bird juice" would appeal to a fox as much as to a dog.

Caught!

Yesterday Dave and I went to see "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie." OK, it's hardly cerebral, but I've been a fan of AbFab since its heyday in the '90s and I had to see how the characters were managing the modern world. We had a great time. The movie is a hoot, and full of celebrity cameos and appearances by nearly all the cast members from the original show. However, let me just say, NO MOVIE is worth the £41.66 it cost us for two tickets to an afternoon matinee, a coffee, a small popcorn and a bottle of water. (That's $55, converting our newly weakened pound.)

This is why we never go to movies in a cinema. Insane.

This morning I'm off to Tampa for two weeks of family time in the Sunshine State!

Mud and Beetle

Olga and I went back to the Heath again yesterday -- I'm trying to give her lots of walking time since I'll be away for two weeks beginning tomorrow. (Dave is an excellent dog parent but he doesn't much like walking Olga -- he's of the firm opinion that she gets enough exercise romping around in the back garden. So she's unlikely to see the Heath again until I return.)

She found this tiny mud puddle in the middle of the forest and made the most of it. One good thing about walking her in the summer -- we can bathe her afterwards with the garden hose, which is much easier than putting her in the tub!

Here's one more picture for the "Small World" collection -- a shiny green beetle on some thistle, which we found yesterday. I believe this is a rose chafer beetle.

Dave spent yesterday in the garden, moving around some plants and putting a few new ones in the ground. He dug up the lupines, which you may remember were proving way too tempting to the snails, and put them in a pot -- we think we can defend them better that way. You should see how sad they look once removed from the surrounding foliage. They're just ravaged sticks!

Small World

Yesterday was, for the most part, beautiful and sunny -- so Olga and I went to the Heath. We found a fallen leaf with pond-ripple patterns...

...and some clumps of heather.

We also found lots of insects, including a ladybug on a thistle...

...and a stink bug on some dock, which is about the hardest weed to pull I've ever found...

...and a green, shiny, David Bowie-looking bug on another thistle.

On the way home, I saw a piece of glass buried in the mud of the path with the letters "TRACT" on the side. I dug it out, thinking it might be part of an old bottle of "extract," or a pharmaceutical of some kind -- and indeed, the bottom is dated 1846! You know how I often find bits of old broken china on Hampstead Heath. I think parts of it must have been a dumping ground long ago, or perhaps debris was used to pave the Heath's walking paths.

I had my final French class of the term yesterday. (There's one more next weekend, but since I'll be in Florida, I'm going to miss it.) No more français until the fall!

I Can See Clearly Now

Dave and I went yesterday to have our eyes checked. We've been meaning to go for months; we kept talking about it and talking about it, and finally Dave made an appointment. We both knew we needed reading glasses. We weren't sure about the rest of our sight overall.

I last went to an optician in 1999, when I lived in Sarasota, Fla. She sold me a stylish but completely unnecessary pair of glasses. They were a very mild prescription to clarify my distance vision, but I found that wearing them made my eyes ache. After a couple of months of off-and-on use, I put them in a drawer and never touched them again.

I did, however, save them through all my subsequent moves, because those frames -- little oblong lenses, light wire -- were expensive! And it's a good thing I did, because, yes, I need reading glasses (my regular vision is still 20-20) and the optician here said it would be no problem to use my pricey frames.

Consequently, the fee for my exam and new lenses came to about £100. Dave's fee was four times as much, because he needed frames, too.

I had a pretty good idea my eyes were OK overall, because with all my photography I'd never experienced blurriness or any indication of a problem. (At least, not while taking my pictures. When I try to look at them afterwards in the camera display, I have to hold it about as far away from my body as my arm will extend.)

In other news, our landlord has agreed to renew our lease. Yay! This is a huge relief. Dave kept saying she had no reason not to, but I envisioned a homeless nephew who needed a place to live, or a plan to renovate, or a scheme to sell our unit to the upstairs neighbors so they could occupy the whole house. Fortunately, none of that appears in the offing. We (and Olga) are safe to enjoy the garden for another year!

(Photos: Ducks near the West Heath, June 15.)

Surfing and Nigeria

I swear, it's like winter around here this week. We're having lots of gray skies, intermittent rain and temperatures in the 50s and 60s. I'm wearing a sweatshirt. Every time the sun peeks through for a brief second, I think, "I remember you!" -- and then it's gone.

Our banking drama is done. We have now fully migrated to an account where we won't be charged monthly. So that's a relief. Our lease renewal, meanwhile, remains in limbo.

The disaster that is Brexit continues to unfold, as it will for months and years. The financial industry is discussing which city should replace London as Europe's financial capital, with the attendant departure of thousands of jobs. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson won't be our next PM, which is fine with me.

Honestly, I don't have much else to tell you. I spent yesterday in the garden and on the couch, reading William Finnegan's surfing memoir, "Barbarian Days," which I'm loving even though I know nothing about surfing. I don't think I've ever touched a surfboard, much less ridden one. The book conjures up a mythical time and place in American culture -- Southern California and Hawaii in the 1960s -- and it's a classic example of the fact that a good writer can make any story interesting.

Have you heard about the woman in Maiduguri, Nigeria, who has an Instagram account on which she posts pictures of local residents? It's sort of like Humans of New York, Nigeria-style. She's trying to bring some positive recognition to a corner of Africa that has been ravaged by violence and Boko Haram. It's pretty remarkable, and I love the fact that a woman is behind it -- I'm impressed by her courage.

(Photo: An unused doorway at a house in Pimlico, on Tuesday. Well, unused for ingress and egress, anyway -- the geraniums apparently enjoy it.)