More pearls and a longtime delusion

Beware the urge to check your pleasant word in the dictionary. The familiar one you believe you know so clearly that you'd never researched it. But you don't know. Not really.

All my life—forever, until today—I've believed the surface of a pearl was formed of the magical.creamy.delicious French nacre. But no. Nacre is mother of pearl and lines the lovely shells we used as ashtrays on screened porches circled with windchimes. Fine, but nacre is not a pearl and no one smokes any longer, so I plant succulents in the shells. Briefly. They advance quickly from shallow shells to celadon pots. There's another word I won't look up. Celadon. And shagreen. Onion skin. Penultimate.

I prefer innocence. Illusion. Delusion. I prefer nacre as the surface of my pearls. Or glow.

I checked a thesaurus. There is no synonym listed for 'moonlight.'

Wallflowers | long-term potentiation | Memories

I was concerned about sentimentality and photos of roses — or more truthfully, my grandmother and the Windsor Rose nail polish that she wore always and forever. But everyone has a grandmother and a memory or two, the persistence of which is unlikely by any measure, but there it is like Windsor Rose. And the incessant smoking, occasionally with a cigarette holder or possibly cherry tobacco tamped into a carved wood gargoylesque ladie's pipe with semi-precious stone eyes or shrimp cocktail with Saltines or wearing heels and sporting pearl earrings while watering the lawn with an impossibly ugly green hose.... This is the grandmother who taught me to pack her pipe and smoke it. She gave me that pipe by the time I was 10. I lost it or gave it to a friend.

Today I read a NYTimes blog regarding memory. There are currenlty 186 readers' comments posted, but if you sort for Editors' Selections, you might read a dozen or so and then be not quite able to turn off the thought process.

So I quit even thinking the blurry shots might be sentimental.

More pearls and Albert Einstein

This may be the end of the pearls for now. This manipulation, when I am in that sleepy-but-still-pondering place, reminds me of Einstein in his elevator being hauled through time/space — which makes me think of the poem that sent me off into the back alleys of the internets to read about the man in his less lofty moments.

Flying Fish

Eat More Pearls