WELCOME TO BIFOCAL FRIDAYS

I recently started a new job in a formal business setting after 20 years of working in a very independent environment. I absolutely love my new gig, but it does require a pretty unwavering commitment to a solid 9-5 schedule every day, with a generous but very structured vacation policy. I miss some of the flexibility I had before, to take a day or an afternoon or a few hours off at the drop of a hat.

So imagine my delight a few months into the job when I learned that we keep “Summer Hours” for the months of June, July and August. That means Friday afternoons entirely off. I felt like a kid in a candy store as I considered the unexpected gift of this special time suddenly available to me.

It reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, The Saturdays, by Elizabeth Enright, which I have read countless times. In 1940s New York City, the four fictional Melendy children lament that their weekly allowance of 50 cents each isn’t enough to do anything really good with. So they decide to pool their money, and one child will have it all each week in turn, to do something special for a Saturday adventure.

Ten year-old Randy gets to go first, because it was her idea. As she luxuriates in considering her options, she thinks she mustn’t waste a minute or a penny of it. “It was like a door opening into an enchanted country which nobody had ever seen before; all her own to do with as she liked.” This is how I felt about the idea of my Summer Hours. While mine wasn’t an issue of limited spending money, the idea of not wasting a single minute of it was paramount. So I made the decision to approach my Friday afternoons very intentionally, committed to making each one count in a unique and meaningful way, all summer long.

As the Melendy’s father said when he granted approval to their scheme, “See that you do something you really want; something you’ll always remember. Don’t waste your Saturdays on unimportant things.” I wouldn’t waste my precious Friday afternoons. I would do something wonderful (or at least notable) every week, and write about it here so I’d be accountable to the commitment and fully mindful of the adventure.

Of course not every Friday will pan out as some big amazing thing. Maybe one afternoon I will simply clean my house and revel in the fact that I have this lovely home with a new love who has given me a new lease on life in my 50s. Maybe one day I will simply weed the garden and think about life. But there’s plenty to be gotten from that as well.

“We lead a humdrum life when I think about it. It’s funny how it doesn’t seem humdrum,” said Randy Melendy over tea with an old family friend. Mrs. Oliphant replied, “That’s because you have ‘eyes the better to see with, my dear’ and ‘ears the better to hear with.’ Nobody who has them and uses them is likely to find life humdrum very often. Even when they have to use bifocal lenses, like me.”

Join me on my “Summer Hours: Bifocal Fridays” adventures. Maybe you’ll find something new to do with your special time, or just a new way of looking at things.

Friday #14: September 2, 2016

The better to seed you with, my dear

So we have come to the inevitable finish…the last week of Summer Hours…the Bifocal Friday season finale.

And of course, nothing says summer send-off like the Minnesota State Fair.

Drew and I had plans to go on Saturday, because we had tickets to the Weezer show. But all the annual excitement and build-up to the Fair had us thinking about a project we had kept meaning to do all year and hadn’t gotten around to yet…SEED ART!

The crop art show in the Horticulture Building is a State Fair highlight for most Minnesotans, and we are no exception. So we decided this last Bifocal Friday would be the day we would finally become seed artists ourselves. Too late to enter in this year’s fair of course – and maybe our quality won’t even be up to snuff for entering in next year’s competition. But we felt compelled to give it a go.

I had taken the whole day off – in fact, most of the week because it was my birthday week. So we set out early Friday morning seed shopping. Well, actually first we started with coffee at Ma Petite Cheri bakery in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis. It’s a sweet little spot on Franklin Avenue that we’d never been to before, and the coffee was good but sadly the promise of the Croque Monsieur-style pastry was not fully delivered upon. We took our coffee to go and strolled Milwaukee Avenue, that historic vest-pocket treasure of a neighborhood, two city blocks of perfectly preserved small homes built in the 1880s on quarter-sized lots which front onto a grassy pedestrian mall with no direct automobile access.



Onward to the Seward Co-Op Grocery, where we knew we would find bulk bins of edible seeds of all sizes, shapes and colors. Here’s the bounty we ended up with:


Back home, we poured everything out into little bowls, got out our various glues and tweezers and picks and pushers, and got to work.

 

Here’s how mine turned out at the end of the day: a Dios de la Meurte head in honor of the change of seasons coming up soon as we turn the corner into fall and winter.


Drew’s representation of his HandEye Creative business logo is still a work in progress – those individually aligned grains of Forbidden Black Rice take forever to maneuver into place, and the Split Red Lentils are a real challenge to wrangle.



What has NOT been a challenge has been to find something fun and interesting -- new and different or old and cherished – to do with my Bifocal Fridays. I’ll spend the next nine months working hard five full days a week, and dreaming of next summer’s adventures.
Posted by

2 comments:

  1. UnknownSeptember 8, 2016 at 7:13 PM

    Love your seed art, love Milwaukee Rd., who or what the hell is Weezer?

    ReplyDelete
  2. MaiyaSeptember 9, 2016 at 7:12 AM

    It's a 90s-to-present band, silly : ) You've probably heard all their songs and don't even know it. Lots of radio play.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)