Hometown Melancholy

Morning mimosas, days of sun and salt, nights of food and films. . . summer illusions.  Sunday evening preparations for a week of toiling to pay for the fun.  Not simply for the fun.  That would be alright.  But the bathroom repairs, the tree trimmings, and all the other expenses that will surely come my way.

Sunday night, though, back in my own hometown, we take drinks down to the dock on the lake and sit in the balmy breezes.  Life is sad at best on Sunday evenings, horrible at worst, but this Sunday is simply a pleasant melancholy.  An easy dinner, early bed.

Sleep, wake, hope, and then. . . .

I placed a bid on another Leica, an M Monochrom.  It is a ridiculously low bid and I will be outbid again, I know as there are days left in the auction.  It is only a symbolic action, this bidding, but each time, I get closer to simply buying one.  I can spend a few hundred dollars more and have one that is fairly new and in good shape.  I've been down this road before. .  . slumping toward Babylon.

And then, just as I write this, the repairman comes.  $4,500 for a new bathroom.  There goes the camera.  And an entire week, he says.  That is how long the remodel will take.

I am a child.

I've talked to people now who have seen "Tomorrowland."  They say it is a horrible movie, and they wonder which part might have been shot at the Shangri-La.  I am beginning to doubt everything the woman told me.  Perhaps she didn't own the place at all.  Perhaps she simply lived there in one of the concrete block buildings and only came out to tell a tale to assuage her loneliness.  Crazier things happen.

I hope she owns it, though.  Last night I lay in bed and thought about the pictures I could take there.  I could take models and have them slouched around on old steel chairs.  I could take beautiful children.  But there is so much to do and so little time, really, and way leads to way. . . and on and on into some broken and expensive future.

But my summer is going by so pleasantly, and it will be gone too quickly; however, I  look forward to the coming seasons, too.  "Autumn will be here before you know it," Ili says, and I know that it is true.  Tonight we will make dinner and have nothing but Perrier and fun teas in pretty mugs.  We are, we know, both getting fat. There must be days of deprivation and sober fun, nights of movement and yoga.  I will pay the repairman and have it done.  It will be swell.  It will be wonderful.  The rot and the 1970s tile and blue tub will be gone.  It is a blessing, not a curse.

As the factory whistle blows. . . .