Here it is, August already!
Huge to most of us who live here year round. Much ado. Every inch to be reveled in.
Let the phone ring, e-mails pile up ... it's recess! When life should be lived each moment. Not just on the weekend if and when you can carve out a little extra time.
For me, that means outsideness, rather than sitting in my office, fused to my laptop, tending to every thought that flits around the edges of mind (no matter how obsessed that sounds). No, this month is about a break in the page, the quiet within. Even amidst all the organized merry-making, the devised traditions our city is so good at promoting while I struggle to answer the most elemental Seattle Center question: which festival, exactly, occurs this week?
Had I not overheard a woman down at Pike Market say August is all about peace of mind because Mercury is no longer in retrograde, I might not have thought to write about how I feel about this warm-and-windless month that goes through me like champagne partly because it's all too rare in this convergence zone I call home. I have no idea what she meant; Mercury in or out of anything feels like one New Age-ism too many for me, even if it is a big celestial proactive thing or whatever. But from the look in her eyes, it's something good, and that's enough definition for me.
There's just something about August, and I don't know if it's the way the light captures the treetops in the loudest golden silence, or that it releases every generosity I feel for this place, ones that get tucked up inside the back of me in, say, January, the month that makes me nuts, when my only saving grace is that I don't kill myself. Or is it a time-referential seed that gets planted in us at age 6, a feeling of had-better-go-for-fun now before school starts and the season stiffens into fall? Whatever it is, I was born for it.
As was my friend Laura, who says in her energetic kisskiss-gottagobye style I adore, "It's about being outside in a tank top! When else can you ever be outside in a tank top?" Sun-lover me knows exactly what she means, even if anyone who knows us will attest that said shirt, reined in as close as a man's emotions, is stun-ning on her curvaceousness and all but wasted on me even when unbuttoned down to here. But still.
By far the most gratifying part of this break in routine is time. For things like picnics. All year I long to grab my picnic basket ... yeah right, OK, a blanket and some takeout, and head to Madison or Madrona Beach for dinner. Or to walk with a friend without the wind mowing us down as we amble over common ground: work and gossip and family and films we love and the wars and politics we hate. Floodgates open, no need to justify or defend what we say, real connection.
And not to go too luvvy-dovey on you, but my friends and I, and I am sure of this, are exactly why those small bistro tables with only two chairs were invented. Like the ones on the front of La Dolce Vita Ristorante or Uptown Espresso, chairs close enough so that a couple of girlfriends can lean into each other in confidence.
Visually, they boil right down to the single component of what I love most about summer; frankly, about life. It's all about good friends, good food, good drink.
Yep, pull up a chair. Be funny. Amuse me. And for Pete's sake don't mention fall. I feel sad for you if you are worrying about that already.
Sanelli's two-women staging of "The Immigrant's Table" appears at Seattle's Market Theater the next two Fridays, Aug. 11 and 18, at 8 p.m. For more information, call 781-9273.
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