Lemonstar to the World

All over the planet people are gathering around television sets, gathering with friends and strangers, with plates of food and bottles of beer and billowy spliffs, they're gathering on beaches, in mountain valleys, in hot noisy city neighborhoods, in nowheresville, in somewheresville, in refugee tents, campgrounds, chateaus, dachas, grass shacks, and office park cafeterias and condominium villages.

In Lemonstar summer pours on unabated, uninterrupted by the responsibility of adulthood, unchallenged by the More Important, it is July, the backyard long grass is cool, damp from hosing down, bees tap nectar from clover blossoms, the finches ply the bird feeder in bunches, happy with their blunt beaks and sunflower seeds. Puffy cumulus float overhead and intermittently pass across the sun in its bright blue sky, the garden hums in photosynthesizing eagerness, butterflies jaunt about the sultry air.

Holland vs Spain, the great 4 year struggle culminates today in South Africa. Tonight, one nation will celebrate with shouts of triumph while the other will wrest lamentation from otherwise glory.

More even than the Tour de France, the World Cup unites disparate people, unifies a fractious and amorphous collection of humanity into one vortex and focal point - a football pitch, 22 men running around in funny outfits taking themselves too seriously, a stadium of 84,000 vuvuzela-blowing football fanatics, the cacophony of possibility and hope.

Ah Lorca, Picasso, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Cervantes ... art from the low country and the Spanish plateau.