Hello my lovelies!
Happy August 28th to you! August 28th is “Race your mouse” day. This amuses me. Since I don’t have a mouse, I shall have to attempt to race the rabbit when I get home. He will probably not be particularly amused by this. Einstein amuses me on a regular basis, but I rarely manage to amuse him. Saturday is “toasted marshmellow day” which I will be sure to celebrate with much more enthusiasm!
This morning when your uncle and I went for our walk,we saw a deer – which happen more often than not – but this deer was already turning gray. In the spring, the deer start to turn a warm orange-y brown, but then in the fall they turn grayish brown. I don’t like it. Not because they’re not still beautiful animals, but because it’s a sure sign that cold weather is coming. And this year it seems like winter will probably come early, and THAT is sad for sure. Such lucky girls you are to live in Florida, where winter is wonderful and not full of bitter cold and snow. Do you still remember Minnesota winters, or have you forgotten them already?
This week I’ve chosen a painter I love because he was a really interesting human being, but whose work has always been a little too strange for me. Salvador Dali is his name. He lived in the 1900s, and was alive when I was a girl (he passed away in 1989). He was a brilliant painter, but sometimes people forget that because the work he was most famous for was “Surrealism”, which is strange, so you get so caught up in the oddness of the picture that you don’t notice how technically awesome his work really was.
His most famous piece is “The Persistence of Memory” which shows melting pocketwatches. I understand it’s a statement about time being more fluid than people think it is – we think of time in rigid, mathematical bits – seconds and minutes and hours, but when you get older and think back on your life, some long ago bits will be perfectly clear in your memory like they happened 5 minutes ago, and some recent bits will be so unimportant that they’re not even really there anymore (like I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday if my life depended on it, but I’m totally sure that I did have breakfast), so in the perspective of a lifetime, time is kind of squishy.
So why was Dali an interesting human being? He was a lot less afraid of being unusual than most people are – he didn’t worry about people thinking he was odd, he embraced it! Once he got asked to give a lecture at an art museum…he showed to give it up wearing a full diving suit with a helmet, carrying a pool stick and walking two Russian wolfhounds (Big, BIG dogs). There is a singer right now, you might have heard of her, called “Lady GaGa”….a few years ago she got a lot of publicity for showing up at something or other wearing a dress made of raw meat. (Which had to have been pretty gross to have on – ick). Anyway, at the 1939 Worlds Fair – like 80 years before Lady GaGa did it - Salvador Dali had an exhibition piece which featured live models wearing outfits made of fresh seafood…and probably people had been doing things like that for hundreds of years before him, since in both cases it sure did stir up some controversy!
Anyway, my message for today is this: “Always be a first rate version of yourself, rather than a second rate version of somebody else.” Judy Garland said that. She was right. J
Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.
Hugs and kisses,
Auntie Paula
Xoxoxoxo
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