Much is made at this time of year of the Solstice. Longest dark, rebirth of the sun, the space that we think of as nothing, blah blah blah. Me, I hold on fast to the two extra minutes of light we’ll get tonight, and again tomorrow, and on until the glorious return of Spring and then, even better, Summer. I know I’m supposed to hunker down by a cheery fire, knit soup out of root vegetables, and look deep within myself. But I just keep hoping that maybe the universe will figure out how to do without Winter next year. I know I’ve hunkered in July before.
Last night I was at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate park. Somebody had the genius idea of lighting this exquisite building up every night for a month and playing restful rainforesty type music. Your ticket allows you a half hour to wander entranced through the steamy rooms exclaiming at the artfully lit tropical plants and feeling transported to another world. For the most part, I like the world we are in very much, but after a long week of ministering to the dying, I just wanted another world for a half hour.
Golden Gate park was veiled in swaths of mist and lit with the one-day-off-full moon. Early for our ticketed time, my girlfriend and I wandered around, feeling like we were in a Dickens novel. We made it as far as the giant lit tree at the Panhandle entrance, and she regaled me with her tale of driving up from L.A. once to attend the Berkeley funeral of a writer she admired. Not that she was invited. When she found out her heroine had died, she called a friend in San Francisco and said hey, wanna crash a funeral with me? It was comforting to me to be reminded of how nutty she is. I hope somebody cares enough to crash my funeral.
It got me thinking about that movie with Emily Blunt where she’s crashing some party in a fancy hotel and runs into the mens’ bathrooms to escape her pursuers. I tried to tell my friend about it, how she overhears a guy running for Senator of New York who has locked himself in a cubicle to rehearse his acceptance speech. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie, or the name of the actor, but I knew there was another great actor in the movie, so I tried to remember his name. He’d been in a fabulous movie about transvestites, but I couldn’t remember the name of that movie either. The senatorial hopeful had written and directed a movie years ago with another guy whose first name I knew was Ben. We started there. Took us a while, but eventually we got Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Terrence Stamp and, after a lot of effort, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Goodwill Hunting. We just needed to lie down somewhere then, but it was time for Night Bloom.
In the foyer, an enthusiastic docent named Drew gave us a quick background on the Conservatory. My favorite part was how it had miraculously survived both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes intact, but lost the majority of its delicate single-paned windows in hurricane force winds one fateful night in December 1995. Tasked with revamping a historic building, the contractors learned that they were legally obliged to rebuild with the same materials the building was made of. This, they discovered, was old-growth redwood. They had to spend six years collecting enough fallen or endangered trees, but the newly refurbished Conservatory finally opened in 2003. I looked around the white beams and stained glass of my favorite building with renewed respect. Love of a building is a uniquely fierce sort of love.
As I ambled through the Lowlands Tropics, my favorite room because it’s the steamiest, a thousand pinpricks of colored light played on the ferns and palms. I could not help thinking how romantic it would be to come to Night Bloom on a date. I could see there were many couples lurking among the carnivorous plants. There was also a guy in tights and a thong doing a photo shoot. He was striking some very unrainforesty poses. I tried very hard not to stare and apparently I was more successful than my girlfriend, who reported sotto voce that he was not very well hung. While I was surreptitiously trying to check what she meant by this, a staff member with a very fancy looking camera asked if he might take our picture. We flicked our hair back and smiled our red-carpet smiles. You don’t have to be wearing tights and a thong to be in a photoshoot in my world.
Outside in the cool misty night, my girlfriend and I swung lazily in the plastic crescent moon swing seats that are part of the whole crazily Alice-In-Wonderland exhibit and reflected on how we are both serial monogamists. She had some single years in her twenties. I could not ever remember more than six months on my own until I left this last marriage. (Yes, I just wrote the words this last marriage. Who am I?!) We reflected on how sweet it can be to be single when you really enjoy your own company and have more than two dollars to rub together. And I wondered aloud if my unrequited love thing is a subconscious way for me to stay single for a bit. No, said my girlfriend with irritating clarity, it’s just keeping you stuck. If we’d been in the same plastic crescent moon swing seat I’d have smacked her. Not even if he leaves his - I began. No, she said firmly. Girlfriends. Even if they have a history of crashing funerals, they were actually invented to save you from yourself.
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