The fine weekend that is ending could have been better. What would have made it better would have been another day or two off of work. Having Friday off of work helped, but Monday and Tuesday would just about take care of my recreational needs for the week.
Saturday I was out the door before Parker woke up, which doesn't actually mean that I left early, but that I was early enough to evade parental responsibility until evening. What luxury to go to the coffee shop and take my drink with me to a park to sketch. I don't think I could find the park again which is a shame because it presented so much interesting subject material that choosing what to draw was difficult. I was happy to find some heavy construction equipment parked at odd angles and began drawing, but I was very tempted to change my focus to the pavilion set at the edge of the lagoon, drained for the construction project and revealing all sorts of interesting secrets that its water usually kept out of sight. I was also drawn to the idea of recording some of the people who were enjoying their sunny day in the park. There was a wide variety of humanity to choose from. A young man wearing an artsy cap worked with a beautiful blonde--his girlfriend? a model he'd hired?--having her pose this way and that as he snapped photos of her with an impressively complex camera. Young boys fished the shallow remnants of the lagoon--"For what?" I wondered, as the mud-tinged water seemed too shallow to harbor anything that employed gills. "They're crabbing," my companion suggested. I suppose catching anything didn't really matter to the boys. They frequently pulled their lines out of the water and raced around the perimeter of the lagoon, scaling fieldstone ledges and moved by the first warm sunshiny Saturday of the year to hoot and crow like birds.
Some of the subjects were older, professionals by the look of them, dressed in khakkis and bearing clipboards and serious expressions as they paced from point A to point B and stood, thinking or so it seemed, and then paced on for another segment. They looked like they were performing some set routine with planned sequences of progress and pauses. Joggers and runners passed through in pairs or singly. Another person's traverse was slower and his partner was a dog who trotted next to his master's wheelchair. They stopped to watch the fisherboys for a while and one of the clipboard-pacing guys visited with the man for a little while, petting the German Shepherd. The dog didn't lose his on the job alertness even while being petted by the stranger.
You might think that I was so busy checking out the distractions that I never did draw at all, but I did just about finish drawing the whatchamacallit which stretched out, mud-streaked and muscular in the sunshine. It looked much simpler before I really LOOKED at it as I drew. It was a great workout, I will say that about it.
Today was a day to put even that kind of work aside and my buddy Bonnie and I launched this year's gardening season. There's nothing to do yet, but have the best garden of the season--the one you have in mind before the seeds don't sprout, before the rabbits eat everything, before the bugs infest, before the wilt, the drought, the weeds, the sick of the very idea of working out in the yard. After shopping at the garden shop we had a mid-afternoon breakfast and a long visit.
As I said, it was a very good weekend. I think I just might be able to make it through the workweek so that I can have another one.
