Vit Babenco's Reviews > Revenge of the Lawn

Simplicity can be both poetic and beautiful…

My grandmother, in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past. She was a bootlegger in a little county up in the state of Washington. She was also a handsome woman, close to six feet tall who carried 190 pounds in the grand operatic manner of the early 1900s. And her specialty was bourbon, a little raw but a welcomed refreshment in those Volstead Act days.
She of course was no female Al Capone, but her bootlegging feats were the cornucopia of legend in her neck of the woods, as they say. She had the county in her pocket for years. The sheriff used to call her up every morning and give her the weather report and tell her how the chickens were laying.

What is human life? Human life is just a soap bubble: we are blown, we are beautifully iridescent, we soar awhile then we burst. And on a cosmic scale any human destiny is no more important than a destiny of a soap bubble.

There were children playing a game with bubbles at the place I had chosen to leave the park. They had a jar of magic bubble stuff and little rods with metal rings to cast the bubbles away with, to join them with the air.
Instead of leaving the park, I stood and watched the bubbles leave the park. They had a very high mortality pulse. I saw them again and again suddenly die above the sidewalk and the street: their rainbow profiles ceasing to exist.
I wondered what was happening and then looked closer to see that they were colliding with insects in the air. What a lovely idea! and then one of the bubbles was hit by the Number 30 Stockton bus.
Wham! like the collision between an inspired trumpet and a great concerto, and showed all those other bubbles how to go out in the grand style.

Even soap bubbles can have their star moments…