9/3/98.. Monarchs in Passage.

Bonnie fluttered her skirts at Maine, giving us a gasp of southern humidity, but the night air is now crisp and full of dancing stars. It gets hot enough at mid day to make you want to jump in the pond, but the quilt is back on the bed. Monarchs are fluttering through. Alighting on the Queen Anne's Lace. Moving on.

I'm still bonding with a tomato red buggy. Ebba continues to miss when you tromp her, and burns a little oil. Old distributor and worn valve guides, I suspect. Just enough quirks to keep you alert. I'd forgotten that sense of constant attentiveness you get driving old iron. The upshot is: she won't change my patterns of mobility much. I'm still biking around town, and postponing road trips until I've got a long list. Or a load to haul.

Peggy has shouldered her burden again, and the big yellow busses are shushing to a stop along the Brooklyn Road, picking up this year's crop of kids. Back to school. After a couple weeks of frenetic, end of summer, buzz, an unfamiliar quiet has settled on the neighborhood. Peggy exhibits that perennial pedagogical peculiarity: fall enthusiasm. She's anticipating a good year. I'm hoping for the best.

Brisk mornings get your blood stirred. I've been out in the shop early and often, facing all the putoffs of the sultry season. The recent rains, and this high pressure, seem to have knocked down the pollen, so my head is clear, and even the Spanish cedar can't make me sneeze. It also helps that I've finally started taking meds to boost my insulin receptivity.. and, WHOOSH.. what a rush to actually have some energy. Burn sugar, burn. I can't tell if it's Autumn setting in, my metabolism starting to work, or just the crest of a wave, but everything seems possible this week. A seasonal affective reorder? I'll take a dozen.

Out wheeling around by the Community School the other AM, Ray stopped me, and asked when I was going to do a painting of his house. I promised to put it on my list, although it's a tough call. There isn't an angle that says anything but HOUSE. As I was circling the subject, and throwing a stick for his dog, Ray commented,"What a great life! You can go out riding your bicycle and do a painting whenever you feel like it." He made it sound pretty good, even to me.

I demurred, "You can make yourself miserable, no matter what you do." But I could see he suspected I was enjoying myself.

And I have been. Every blue moon you get a run of days when everything fits. Something to do with luck. Maybe it's the fuzzy dice Peggy hung up in Ebba. At the risk of cursing ours, I'd like to describe a good day. For the record.

My metabolism kicked into arousal mode around 5:00 Wednesday. Or maybe it was the foraging skunk pluming a trail under the bedroom window. Anywhy, I stirred. Shut the window. Turned on the light and perused the book pile. Americana? Cutting edge tech? Chevy manual? Botany? Philosophy? Poetry? I settle on "Waiting for Godot." Dan on the Cape is performing in a current production, and his e-mail hints at oblique references. "We are what we are."

Becket is just the thing for a semi-lucid state. Dreamlike images and hanging dialogue. Just depressing enough to bump me up onto my feet. Feed the dog. The cat's still missing, and our hopes are fading. Between the coyote Earl saw stalking his cats, the family of foxes denned up by Frank's pond, and the hungry road, I fear that Miso has crossed over. A lovely little cat, who is/was terrified of me. Makes me feel like a monster. She would bolt whenever I got near. I think it's because I'd slammed her in the door one too many times. I have guilt relationships with cats.

Clothing. Morning rituals. Tea. Cereal. Half a pill. I shamble out to the shop and admire the possibilities. Heavy dew soaks my sneakers, and the bird chorus performs. I try to find Public Radio on the box, but all I get is a Holyrolling Radio Station. A new cell phone tower has poked up over our horizon, and the Jesus radio leasees on top are splashing gospel all across the dial. Maybe I didn't want a dose of news, good or bad, this morning.

I've been dosing myself with a few pages of illuminated text each morning, as part of my shop voodoo. I tumbled on a copy of "The Avatars", by A.E. (Yeats' buddy, George Russell), at Clair's Old Books recently, and it's so filled with light that a page or two will do for daily inspiration. Today's sip of mystic fiction makes me lightheaded. In my giddiness, I suddenly see into the big image I'm conjuring: a softshoe lobster.

I made a tactical error with the patron on this one. After I hung the big eagle on his restaurant, we talked about designs for the next one, and he asked to see "some sketches." Generally I don't do sketches of 3D work in gestation. First, I don't habitually think in 2D, and have only mastered flat imaging in the last few years. Second, because I find blueprints inhibiting. My best designs spring from a dialogue between the materials and the concepts. If I refine an image on paper, I tend to force the materials into that mold, rather than be inspired by their nature. But these barnboard marquetries are a different breed of beast. They verge on the two dimensional, and they require control of scale. Letting the materials inform design usually means I have no idea how big the finished piece will be. That won't work when you have a wall of limited dimensions. Knowing I would be doing working sketches for the piece, I said OK, I'd send them along to the patron.

Bad idea. The third reason I don't "do sketches", is that people love to tinker with creative designs, and I'd forgotten that. It's much better to bat verbal images back and forth until a design concept integrates, then leave the artist alone to work with the materials. Instead, I found myself spending days perfecting paper images, which the happy patron could reject, or propose refinements to. And he did. I'd come to regret the commission. Fortunately, the patron was delighted with my dancing lobster drawing.

This critter is half man, half crustacean. In striped pants and saddle shoes, he's cutting a bit of soft shoe, with a cane in one claw and the crescent moon in the other, tipped like a tophat. From shoetip to moon horn, he's going to be 20 feet across. If I can control the dimensions.

So far the design has all been about superficials. Seafood. Entertainment. Locale and parameters. But I've been watching the new moon fatten in the west, and in this morning's ritual I got a glimpse of deeper meaning for this illusion.

I realized that it's an OLD moon, horns to the right. A vision at dawn. In the east. (The image will be reaching east on the building, too.) More apt for today's lobster man than the new moon I'd thought I was conjuring. While he's doing a jig, the tune, I suspect, is a lament. A sign turns into a symbol. I was stirring all this stuff from the onset, but now I've got a purchase on the heft of it. A bigger idea to balance.

But the pieces of cedar I've jigged out on the deck are too wet for me to be dancing with lobsters at this hour. Peggy fires the Owl and takes off for Freeport High. I grab the digital O and saddle up my pony.

I'm learning how to play with this electronic tool. Its limitations and delights. I took a picture of the wall Mr. Homard will hang on, then scanned in the sketch, scaled them, and printed the combined image. Knowing the shingle coverage, I now have a fixed gauge to scale the actual pieces to. Pretty neat.

I'm also trying to perfect the process of recording scapes for painting, so when the weather shuts down Al Fresco I can continue my chronicle of Bowdoinham from prints. If I shoot a wide angle scene at the highest resolution, tweak it in Photoshop, scale it down to 8X10 at 150ppi, and print it at max clarity, I can paint from the output without much ado. This has extended my "sketching" range as well as the sketching season. I roam farther afield on my bike, taking snaps, instead of hunkering down close to home with watercolors. I mix and match. Some days lugging one kit, some days the other. This morning I'm headed out the Millay Road with Digi-O.

Cresting the top of Center Street I'm hailed by Mm. Lyons, who is out fussing with her flowers. "Did you just ride up THAT hill?," she asks. I'm puffing too hard to be coherent. I just nod.

I did a commission painting of her house last month, and was amused by the response. Her husband is a fanatically meticulous homeowner, and had set ideas about what view was proper. When they came out at 7AM and found me painting the "wrong" angle, they sputtered until I shifted my seat. When I was done, they liked the image, sort of. But he said he wished the front porch had been drawn "level." He couldn't grasp that a perspective drawing of a building won't have every line "level." I was tempted to redraw the house with "level" walls, for comic effect. Instead I left him vaguely discontented. We forget how specialized the creation, and perception, of visual illusions is.

The sun is lifting the dew now, and raising a sweat on the sugar burning cycler. Kay is out walking their dog on the Millay Road, and we commiserate about the new school year. She says Hal is up playing piano in their cathedral of a house. He's been building it for three years, thanks to a fat inheritance, and it's fit for concerts by a symphony orchestra. A contractor/musician's dream castle.

I start seeing photos after I cross the interstate, shooting low res snaps until I find the most telling view. It's cooler under the big maples and pines along this back road, but they've just paved it all the way to the Bowdoin line, and it will soon be another through way. The residents petitioned the town for paving. Now they'll suffer the consequences.

And there it is. Today's subject. An absolutely plain trailer with a clothesline displaying a series of faded bluejeans. A class act. I try a couple of low res samples, then record the best view at full charge. Kick my pony homeward.

Bob is coming out of Jeanine's after his breakfast, and I shoot some candids of the wildman as we jaw it over. He has some ash I can use for the moon, and we agree to meet at his place to do a deal.

Ebeneza coughs and sputters a bit, but she rumbles up to revs eventually, and I safari to Bob's World for materials. I back into his jungle, and park at the top of the hill, rather than scrape the paint by trying to drive all the way in through the puckerbrush. Bob proudly shows me his scoured boatshop, empty except for a desperate old cedar canoe. The rest of his universe may be in total chaos, but Bob has made an open space from which to view the new school year. I make the appropriate noises, and lug my ash plank up to Ebba.

It's dry enough now to cakewalk with crustacea, and I spend the next 3 hours lining out, cutting, fitting, carving, and sanding Spanish cedar. Fans blowing. Astringent volatiles wafting. Sweat stinging. By noon I'm stripped down to hat, jeans and barefeet. Ol Sol still has an edge out on the deck. And I'm glad for the respites in the breezy Eagles.

I bike down to the restaurant for a cup of soup and a parle with the luncheon crowd. Two ladies from the med tech shop tell me that their crew wants to commission a toy portrait of the owner for Christmas. Dandy. Brothers Brent and Max are there, as usual, but we're only half way into our chow when first Mitch and then Cornish roll up in their pickups. Mitch is so loud that conversation stops in Jeanine's when he holds forth. And Cornish is worse. They also have the biggest store of outrageous lies in the county, and the whole place listens in, trying not to choke on its lunch.

Mitch tells about going into the girly show at the county fair in the early 60s. "There was this luscious blond honey wiggling out front," he recounts, "but inside this large middle-aged babe in a two piece came on stage. She had a nasty scar across her belly, full of sequins. She puts on a scratchy phonograph. DahdadadadaDAH,dahdadaDAH... 'What should I take off first?' she whispered, and I turned to the guy I was with, and said, 'How about 50 pounds.' They threw me out." Alley nearly spills the soup and the place explodes.

Primed for the next lap, I pedal back up home, and retreat to the shop shade. It's a perfect drying day, so I put another coat of varnish on Peggy's new teaching stool, and do some detail painting on the big ravens. It's wonderful to have a big enough shop to be able to go from project to project without tripping over myself, especially when the sawdust begins to get me, or coats of paint and varnish have to dry between sessions. I've got five pots bubbling now, and can stir them each in turn. I set the wet ravens in the shed to dry, and return to Homard.

Peggy beeps up the drive around 4PM, full of school news, and with enthusiasm unabated, so far. We forage in the garden for ripe tomatoes. The squash finally decided to come on, in late August, and we are kneedeep in provender. This is the first year ever we've gotten full sized green peppers, and the woodchucks have stayed out of the broccoli. Even the scarlet runner beans have been yielding a late crop. Snapdragons and exotic lilies are coloring the beds.

Peggy wants to go for a swim, so we tog up and clamber into the tomato wagon. Roll out for Pleasant Pond. The kids diving off the causeway bridge give EB admiring glances when we rumble up, and we clamber down the embankment to join them in the cool pellucid water. I'm a thin-skinned inandout kinda aquatist, but Peggy likes to lap back and forth, so I enjoy the hot sun drying my back while I admire a lone dead tree towering over the cattails.

Home by 5, I get a few more licks in at the wood game, while Peggy rustles up another choice repast. This summer she's refound her interest in food, and has been surprising me with exotic delights. Now that school's started, I'll have to turn my thoughts toward the table to give her a spell. Maybe with my sugar down I won't be as ambivalent about cooking as I've been this year.

It's drawing night at Carlo's, but Peggy is too wrung out to go. I toss my kit together and fly the Owl up the Post Road. By the time we're through the one minute warmup poses there's a full house, and I'm glad I was early enough to claim my old standup perch, where there's more elbow room. There are 16 of us trying to capture Amelia as she moves from gesture to gesture.

I continue to be surprised by my figure drawings. Not one of them is a good likeness, and there isn't a failed drawing in the bunch. A loose fluidity of line and wash is coming together in lively images that speak in their own dialect, without benefit of proper grammar. I just stand back and watch it happen. Neat.

I bow out after the first half-hour pose. Too long for the medium I'm playing with. Maybe I should bring alternate materials for the longer poses. I'm just as happy to be home with Peggy for a bit, before she passes out.

We share our thoughts, and I read the e-mail, tap the spelling machine, while she novels her way to sleep. I'm not far behind. A few pages of "The Language Instinct," and it's lights out for campers. Happy campers. Today, at least.