It would have been easy to blow it off and stay home, rest up from a day of gardening, be a rational animal and read a book. But did I do the rational thing, fellow homo sapiens, follow the path of moderation and leave partying to the young?
Hell no.
It was still early by the time I had pulled enough weeds for one day and moved some stones from the front yard to the back. I scrounged some stakes and tied up the small but growing tomato plants with old shoelaces. I even took a short nap on the Adirondack chair. I had plenty of time for a quick shower, change of clothes, and salad with Gven on the patio. She had spent all day at a yoga workshop and was, well, spent and not in the mood for ComFest. So I went by myself.
The weather was perfect, finding a parking place was easy, and the walk from Italian Village was even pleasant. I walked around a little before getting in line for a tall mug of pale ale, then ran into a friend by the jazz stage. We hadn't seen each other in a couple of years - since the Thursday after-work basketball ritual came and went - and I guess we'd both changed a little. He has a different job downtown now, but he's still playing softball with the same team he's been on for like eight years, so there is some continuity in life. He didn't get into other life-changing events except to say that he's doing more writing and less drinking as he assesses the state of his life and health.
My friend moved on to find the other people he had arranged to meet, and I parted ways to find the other people I had not arranged to meet. A band I like was just then taking the stage honking, wailing and moaning, but I only listened to one tune before wandering off while it was still light outside. On my way nowhere in particular, I heard the sound of drumming and followed it to a circle of folks tucked away in the small tent village. Some were drumming, some dancing, some just swaying back and forth. I'm a swayer myself.
Eventually a familiar face appeared, a woman from church who has done a little drumming herself. "So these are your people," she said. I said I didn't know. We talked a little bit, I met her friend, and they went on their way.
Little did I know. While swaying, I accepted someone's offer of a spare drum, and pretty soon I was into it. I switched off the first drum for a pair of bongos, which I found harder to play and be heard. I left and came back. Then a seat in the circle opened up, and a bigger, louder drum found its way between my legs, the owner's only request being that I put a piece of cloth between the drum and the ground. That's when things started cooking. I can't say for sure whether the energy level went up a notch or whether I just felt it more since I was more a part of it.
But this is just me writing about it long after the fact, and writing about drumming is like singing about architecture is like dancing about poetry is like...an incommensurable medium of discourse. You had to be there. A couple of drummers start small, a couple more add volume, a few more bring in complexity, and when it really heats up, the dancers leap into the circle feeding on the rhythm and giving back their own. It goes on for a while like that, and then it comes down to rest.
It was equal-opportunity revelry: lots of young men, lots of young women, a few older men, a few older women, all sizes, shapes, and colors, some doing an ego trip but most just taking part. Good clean fun with a whole lotta shakin'.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Monday, June 26, 2006
Vini, vidi, vacati
I came, I saw, I went on vacation.
Then I came back and responded to the need to chronicle the experience, which turned into a convoluted experience in itself, taking two more weeks to process the process in the process of describing the process. In a word, it has faded faster than the tan on my low-melanin skin. Does that mean it was all skin-deep? I'll let the reader be the judge.
Day one
Corolla, NC, Monday, 6/5/06
We arrived at the coast last night after a long day's drive from Central Swingstate and slept well in the king-sized bed. Got up, had coffee upstairs with Merlian, Curt, and Keith, and started to settle into their established family rhythm and the neutral space. The kitchen, dining room, TV/music room, and deck are on the third floor, with four bedrooms on the second floor, three bedrooms and another TV/music room on the ground floor. Lots of space. Patio, pool, grill, and a good-sized lawn.
Over breakfast (Joan's banana bread) we looked through the Marshall family geneology book. Gven's dad Curt showed me the pages outlining his grandfather Ballard Marshall's branch of the tree, and we found the branches of that branch, including Curt's mother, Lake Marshall, his sisters, his children, including Gven, and our own little ones and their dates of birth. We seem to belong to this clan.
I went for a walk by myself and saw lots of interesting flora, some kind of laurel I think, lots of native hollies and pine, and a fox creeping behind a house. I came back and started a pot of red bean soup to carry me through the week and invited anyone else to help themselves. I had an audience while cutting up onions and peppers, and I'm afraid the peppers scared them off. To his credit, Curt tried the soup and declared it 'hot'.
Nephew-in-law Scott Kiernan collared me for a while to talk about his Duncan relatives a couple of generations back. The Kiernans are related by marriage to the Duncans, including the famous dancer Isadora and her brother Raymond, who worked a lot in Paris, New York, and Greece to develop a school and community of artists.
Gven and I went for a nice long bike ride up to the lighthouse and back, discovering bike paths off the highway, a place to pump up tires, and access to the public beach. I even found a pair of clip-on sunglasses that fit. It felt good to be out in the warm sunshine and moving. We got back in time for cocktail hour, so Scott K. and I had a gin and tonic together while he talked about New Orleans restaurants he and Misty went to on their honeymoon. Jim talked about rafting the Chatooga, and he got me going about the textbook business, which drew forth an opinion from just about everybody in the room. I got to play a rousing game of whiffleball out on the deck with the little boys, Dylan and Xavier, who alternated pitching to each other while I played catcher. Somehow it was more fun to play ball on the third-floor deck than down in the yard.
Day two
Corolla, NC, Tuesday, 6/6/06
Jim and Sharon drove down to Kitty Hawk in their SUV without us, mostly because I was less than enthusiastic about spending the day driving around site-seeing. After breakfast I took a cup of coffee and a John Barth book out on the deck and did some Basic Movement in the morning sun and the ocean breeze and read a chapter of ripe metafiction by the old master John Barth. Mavis and Dylan had been to the beach already and gave Gven and me walking directions, so we walked down to the water, about a four-block ramble with our chairs and a bag of books and towels. After a couple of hours it clouded up and looked like rain, so we headed back with a few shells to show for it. Not ideal beach weather, but now we know where to find it.
The cast of characters is beginning to take shape for me, a somewhat out-there in-law from the midwest. Here we are, about 20 of us, holed up for a week in a big, built-for-tourists house subdivision on Currituck Sound. It's not where the rich and the super-rich go to play, but it's not where the poor folks go either, it's ordinary working folks from everywhere east of the Mississippi who can afford a week at the beach.
Merlian is usually the first one upstairs in the morning. He takes up his position at the main table, eats his oatmeal, and stays there most of the day observing the procession of younger characters enter and exit the stage. First Joyce and Joan, his tall, still-pretty wife and their organizer-daughter. Then Curt, the quiet patriarch of this crew hobbling up the stairs on his hurting knees, and his wife Mavis, fretting over her adored and adorable grandchildren. Haley and Dylan are usually nearby their mother Tiffany, who is trying mightily to do the right thing as she adapts to single-motherhood.
Keith and Janet eventually appear, but they're more reserved and private, disappearing (like me) when they want or need some alone time, yet making the effort to participate. Keith is Curt and Mavis's second son and Tiffany's brother, making him Gven's half-brother. He got the quiet gene, but he opens up but in the right company, and I enjoyed hearing about some of his misadventures, which made it easier for me to disclose some of my own checkered past. He throws a mean frisbee, too.
Day four
Corolla, NC, Thursday, 6/8/06
Began auspiciously with real French roast coffee instead of the decaf we'd been slipped for three days. If Joan was affronted, she didn't show it. Gven drew the line at promising coffee and providing decaf. Cousin Joan has been many places, but apparently there are a few things she doesn't know, so a quick trip to the Food Lion on route 12 solved the problem, besides being a good way to ogle the young women in the checkout line.
I think Gven and I were more relaxed after an afternoon spent mostly by ourselves driving down to Manteo, enjoying a witty two-woman play about Queens Mary and Elizabeth spiced with contemporary schtick about American politics tossed into the running argument between the feuding Tudor monarchs. We walked around the little tourist town looking at local art and the harbor, then drove back sipping our coconut and peach snowballs. It did us good to get out of the house as things got real on day three.
Tiffany caught the 24-hour virus that Haley had on day two, so she stayed home sleeping and aching while the rest of us went to the play on Roanoke Island. Janet stayed home because she wanted to, and then received the wrath of the mother-in-law for not being a team player. Keith had another Budweiser and let it go. Janet has been a good sport as far as I can tell, so if she retreats to her room or poolside, it's her way of coping with the group situation. I'm sure I don't know the half of it, and doesn't every family have its own internal history that only insiders know?
The warm, not windy morning was an invitation for a bike ride, I realized after breakfast while reading an Anne Lamott novel on the deck. I can into a fully recovered Tiffany on my way downstairs to saddle up Orange Handlebars. She said she was going to the coffee house to work on a test for her anatomy and physiology class. I rode to the hardware store for Allen wrenches, then kept going, down route 12 to the town of Duck, turned around and rode back in the rising heat. I had the sense to stop for water halfway back, then saw the coffee shop, and there she was, sitting at her laptop, being the responsible student working on a new self-definition.
Day five
Corolla, NC, Friday, 6/9/06
A bunch of us took a guided tour of the dunes up beyond the end of the highway and heard a little of the natural and human history of the place. The young tour guy (I say young because he seemed young for a 35-year-old former guitar player and chef looking for his next gig) had a lot of good stories.
One of my favorites was the origin of the lifesaving stations that dot the outer banks every 15 miles or so. There's one at Manteo down south, one at Kitty Hawk, one at Duck, one at Corolla, and one at Carova up near the Virginia state line. They were built around 1875 to watch for shipwrecked sailors, and there were a lot of shipwrecks. Each station had a staff of six workers, who would take turns walking up or down the beach until they met the man from the next station, exchange a ticket to show that they had covered their section, and walk back. When they found a ship in trouble, they shot a cannon loaded with a pair of pants attached to a length of rope out to the ship. With one end of the rope secured to the ship, one by one the stranded sailors would climb in the pants to be pulled in to shore on a pulley. At least that's the story.
We saw some of the famous wild horses up close, and we drove through beautiful downtown Carova, which consists of half a dozen houses and a general store/post office. There were quite a few for-sale signs, and apparently property is still cheap there, although one would need a four-wheel drive even in fair weather. Buyer beware, however, that some of the "waterfront" lots have frontage on a canal that may or may not be connected to the ocean or the sound.
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
Methodistville, OH, 6/10/06
It was a long drive, but we made it, taking a leisurely midday break to explore Charlottesville and daydream about the future. The kids were home when we got there, and Helga had cooked a nice meal for our return - the good daughter. Jessi was there with Alex, his tall, beautiful friend from New York. Gven had not met her before, and over the next couple of days they would spend some time together getting to know each other. We all learned a little bit about one another eating meals together and inhabiting a small house with our big energy. That story can wait for another day.
Then I came back and responded to the need to chronicle the experience, which turned into a convoluted experience in itself, taking two more weeks to process the process in the process of describing the process. In a word, it has faded faster than the tan on my low-melanin skin. Does that mean it was all skin-deep? I'll let the reader be the judge.
Day one
Corolla, NC, Monday, 6/5/06
We arrived at the coast last night after a long day's drive from Central Swingstate and slept well in the king-sized bed. Got up, had coffee upstairs with Merlian, Curt, and Keith, and started to settle into their established family rhythm and the neutral space. The kitchen, dining room, TV/music room, and deck are on the third floor, with four bedrooms on the second floor, three bedrooms and another TV/music room on the ground floor. Lots of space. Patio, pool, grill, and a good-sized lawn.
Over breakfast (Joan's banana bread) we looked through the Marshall family geneology book. Gven's dad Curt showed me the pages outlining his grandfather Ballard Marshall's branch of the tree, and we found the branches of that branch, including Curt's mother, Lake Marshall, his sisters, his children, including Gven, and our own little ones and their dates of birth. We seem to belong to this clan.
I went for a walk by myself and saw lots of interesting flora, some kind of laurel I think, lots of native hollies and pine, and a fox creeping behind a house. I came back and started a pot of red bean soup to carry me through the week and invited anyone else to help themselves. I had an audience while cutting up onions and peppers, and I'm afraid the peppers scared them off. To his credit, Curt tried the soup and declared it 'hot'.
Nephew-in-law Scott Kiernan collared me for a while to talk about his Duncan relatives a couple of generations back. The Kiernans are related by marriage to the Duncans, including the famous dancer Isadora and her brother Raymond, who worked a lot in Paris, New York, and Greece to develop a school and community of artists.
Gven and I went for a nice long bike ride up to the lighthouse and back, discovering bike paths off the highway, a place to pump up tires, and access to the public beach. I even found a pair of clip-on sunglasses that fit. It felt good to be out in the warm sunshine and moving. We got back in time for cocktail hour, so Scott K. and I had a gin and tonic together while he talked about New Orleans restaurants he and Misty went to on their honeymoon. Jim talked about rafting the Chatooga, and he got me going about the textbook business, which drew forth an opinion from just about everybody in the room. I got to play a rousing game of whiffleball out on the deck with the little boys, Dylan and Xavier, who alternated pitching to each other while I played catcher. Somehow it was more fun to play ball on the third-floor deck than down in the yard.
Day two
Corolla, NC, Tuesday, 6/6/06
Jim and Sharon drove down to Kitty Hawk in their SUV without us, mostly because I was less than enthusiastic about spending the day driving around site-seeing. After breakfast I took a cup of coffee and a John Barth book out on the deck and did some Basic Movement in the morning sun and the ocean breeze and read a chapter of ripe metafiction by the old master John Barth. Mavis and Dylan had been to the beach already and gave Gven and me walking directions, so we walked down to the water, about a four-block ramble with our chairs and a bag of books and towels. After a couple of hours it clouded up and looked like rain, so we headed back with a few shells to show for it. Not ideal beach weather, but now we know where to find it.
The cast of characters is beginning to take shape for me, a somewhat out-there in-law from the midwest. Here we are, about 20 of us, holed up for a week in a big, built-for-tourists house subdivision on Currituck Sound. It's not where the rich and the super-rich go to play, but it's not where the poor folks go either, it's ordinary working folks from everywhere east of the Mississippi who can afford a week at the beach.
Merlian is usually the first one upstairs in the morning. He takes up his position at the main table, eats his oatmeal, and stays there most of the day observing the procession of younger characters enter and exit the stage. First Joyce and Joan, his tall, still-pretty wife and their organizer-daughter. Then Curt, the quiet patriarch of this crew hobbling up the stairs on his hurting knees, and his wife Mavis, fretting over her adored and adorable grandchildren. Haley and Dylan are usually nearby their mother Tiffany, who is trying mightily to do the right thing as she adapts to single-motherhood.
Keith and Janet eventually appear, but they're more reserved and private, disappearing (like me) when they want or need some alone time, yet making the effort to participate. Keith is Curt and Mavis's second son and Tiffany's brother, making him Gven's half-brother. He got the quiet gene, but he opens up but in the right company, and I enjoyed hearing about some of his misadventures, which made it easier for me to disclose some of my own checkered past. He throws a mean frisbee, too.
Day four
Corolla, NC, Thursday, 6/8/06
Began auspiciously with real French roast coffee instead of the decaf we'd been slipped for three days. If Joan was affronted, she didn't show it. Gven drew the line at promising coffee and providing decaf. Cousin Joan has been many places, but apparently there are a few things she doesn't know, so a quick trip to the Food Lion on route 12 solved the problem, besides being a good way to ogle the young women in the checkout line.
I think Gven and I were more relaxed after an afternoon spent mostly by ourselves driving down to Manteo, enjoying a witty two-woman play about Queens Mary and Elizabeth spiced with contemporary schtick about American politics tossed into the running argument between the feuding Tudor monarchs. We walked around the little tourist town looking at local art and the harbor, then drove back sipping our coconut and peach snowballs. It did us good to get out of the house as things got real on day three.
Tiffany caught the 24-hour virus that Haley had on day two, so she stayed home sleeping and aching while the rest of us went to the play on Roanoke Island. Janet stayed home because she wanted to, and then received the wrath of the mother-in-law for not being a team player. Keith had another Budweiser and let it go. Janet has been a good sport as far as I can tell, so if she retreats to her room or poolside, it's her way of coping with the group situation. I'm sure I don't know the half of it, and doesn't every family have its own internal history that only insiders know?
The warm, not windy morning was an invitation for a bike ride, I realized after breakfast while reading an Anne Lamott novel on the deck. I can into a fully recovered Tiffany on my way downstairs to saddle up Orange Handlebars. She said she was going to the coffee house to work on a test for her anatomy and physiology class. I rode to the hardware store for Allen wrenches, then kept going, down route 12 to the town of Duck, turned around and rode back in the rising heat. I had the sense to stop for water halfway back, then saw the coffee shop, and there she was, sitting at her laptop, being the responsible student working on a new self-definition.
Day five
Corolla, NC, Friday, 6/9/06
A bunch of us took a guided tour of the dunes up beyond the end of the highway and heard a little of the natural and human history of the place. The young tour guy (I say young because he seemed young for a 35-year-old former guitar player and chef looking for his next gig) had a lot of good stories.
One of my favorites was the origin of the lifesaving stations that dot the outer banks every 15 miles or so. There's one at Manteo down south, one at Kitty Hawk, one at Duck, one at Corolla, and one at Carova up near the Virginia state line. They were built around 1875 to watch for shipwrecked sailors, and there were a lot of shipwrecks. Each station had a staff of six workers, who would take turns walking up or down the beach until they met the man from the next station, exchange a ticket to show that they had covered their section, and walk back. When they found a ship in trouble, they shot a cannon loaded with a pair of pants attached to a length of rope out to the ship. With one end of the rope secured to the ship, one by one the stranded sailors would climb in the pants to be pulled in to shore on a pulley. At least that's the story.
We saw some of the famous wild horses up close, and we drove through beautiful downtown Carova, which consists of half a dozen houses and a general store/post office. There were quite a few for-sale signs, and apparently property is still cheap there, although one would need a four-wheel drive even in fair weather. Buyer beware, however, that some of the "waterfront" lots have frontage on a canal that may or may not be connected to the ocean or the sound.
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
Methodistville, OH, 6/10/06
It was a long drive, but we made it, taking a leisurely midday break to explore Charlottesville and daydream about the future. The kids were home when we got there, and Helga had cooked a nice meal for our return - the good daughter. Jessi was there with Alex, his tall, beautiful friend from New York. Gven had not met her before, and over the next couple of days they would spend some time together getting to know each other. We all learned a little bit about one another eating meals together and inhabiting a small house with our big energy. That story can wait for another day.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Control issues, reality checks, comeuppance, and resolution
Last weekend's gardening was limited to picking a big bowl of strawberries, mowing the postage-stamp lawn, and pulling a few weeds. Yet there were a few surprises: a brilliant magenta disk of bloom on each stem of a transplant that I thought was lamb's ear but has shot upward into tall, multi-stemmed flowers that startle the eyes when you walk in or out the back gate. And the mushroom gravy and biscuits that Jessi and Alex made for breakfast on Sunday.
The old redbud "tree" transplanted from the old house refuses to grow vertically despite all my attempts to stake it and train its multiple stems upward, as a tree is supposed to grow. It persists in spreading its new growth outward every year in its new spot beside the back door, drooping almost to the ground above the irises that surround it. I think I'm fighting a losing battle to make it go up if it wants to go out, because every year it gets stronger and my stakes and I don't.
Should we read parenting metaphors into that? Yes, let's.
This week has been warmer and drier. The grass still needed cutting, the mower didn't get any sharper, and the usual weed suspects are encroaching on salvia, ajuga, and lamium in the shady beds. I picked half a many strawberries as last week, and they're half as big. The spinach and mesclun are about played out, but cabbages and cauliflower and getting big heads. Tomatoes are starting to show some growth with the warm days and nights, and the beans are beginning to climb their poles. A lot of perennials need to be transplanted from crowded beds to empty spaces, but I don't have the energy right now.
I was out of sorts coming home from a long, boring meeting Saturday morning, and it didn't help that the fake health food store on Shock Road was out of whole wheat flour. How do you forget to order flour? Oh, but they had plenty of sweetened yoghurt covered nut balls and over-packaged manufactured food-like products with pictures of smiling suburbanites, just no wheat flour. So I drove to Olde Clintonville and stocked up on flour, rice, beans, cheese, and wine for the party that night at our friends' place in the country.
So I started a batch of bread as son as I got home, and it proofed fast on the patio bricks in the 90-degree heat. But when it came time to put loaves in the oven, the gas oven wouldn't light, and for a while I thought we had a pilot problem, and we still might. Eventually the oven heated up, but not to the right temperature, so the bread took about three hours to bake. I was cutting it close time-wise in the first place, so in my foul temper I blamed my reclusiveness on the oven, the store, the forces of the universe, and called it a day.
Two out of four loaves actually over-baked, and I'm eating them for breakfast and lunch this week as penance. Sunday morning I wore my dynfunctionality to church and even left half my coffee sitting on the kitchen counter undrunk. How counterproductive can you get?
Turns out there was an interesting person sitting next to me in the pew, and we had a nice conversation after church about, of all things, fitting in (or not) in a new community. We both have had varying experiences in moving from one part of the country to another - Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kansas - and found that in some places you have to go back three generations to really belong. Not so much in central Swingstate, which seems more accepting. And in most places, people can spot an outsider a mile away, and once you open your mouth, forget it. Never try to mimic the dialect; folks know a fraud when they hear someone try too hard to talk like the locals.
Most of the afternoon I spent in blissful solitude pulling weeds, transplanting lemonbalm, yarrow, hosta, and salvia, making lentil soup in the crock pot, and burning the brown rice. John and Yoko's song "Isolation" (from the Plastic Ono Band) was running through my self-indulgent head, but I'll get over it. Jessi called from Connecticut, where he's been meeting Alex's family. Just before dark I uncorked the white wine that was meant for the party, poured a glass for Gven, Helga, and myself, and unwound on the patio reading the Sunday paper. Helga made a nice quiche, basmati rice, and some outstanding oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in the uncooperative oven. Gven gave me a Paul Klee print, a couple of cool binding tools - an awl, some linen thread, and a burnishing stone - and a book about book-binding. Awl's well that ends well?
The old redbud "tree" transplanted from the old house refuses to grow vertically despite all my attempts to stake it and train its multiple stems upward, as a tree is supposed to grow. It persists in spreading its new growth outward every year in its new spot beside the back door, drooping almost to the ground above the irises that surround it. I think I'm fighting a losing battle to make it go up if it wants to go out, because every year it gets stronger and my stakes and I don't.
Should we read parenting metaphors into that? Yes, let's.
This week has been warmer and drier. The grass still needed cutting, the mower didn't get any sharper, and the usual weed suspects are encroaching on salvia, ajuga, and lamium in the shady beds. I picked half a many strawberries as last week, and they're half as big. The spinach and mesclun are about played out, but cabbages and cauliflower and getting big heads. Tomatoes are starting to show some growth with the warm days and nights, and the beans are beginning to climb their poles. A lot of perennials need to be transplanted from crowded beds to empty spaces, but I don't have the energy right now.
I was out of sorts coming home from a long, boring meeting Saturday morning, and it didn't help that the fake health food store on Shock Road was out of whole wheat flour. How do you forget to order flour? Oh, but they had plenty of sweetened yoghurt covered nut balls and over-packaged manufactured food-like products with pictures of smiling suburbanites, just no wheat flour. So I drove to Olde Clintonville and stocked up on flour, rice, beans, cheese, and wine for the party that night at our friends' place in the country.
So I started a batch of bread as son as I got home, and it proofed fast on the patio bricks in the 90-degree heat. But when it came time to put loaves in the oven, the gas oven wouldn't light, and for a while I thought we had a pilot problem, and we still might. Eventually the oven heated up, but not to the right temperature, so the bread took about three hours to bake. I was cutting it close time-wise in the first place, so in my foul temper I blamed my reclusiveness on the oven, the store, the forces of the universe, and called it a day.
Two out of four loaves actually over-baked, and I'm eating them for breakfast and lunch this week as penance. Sunday morning I wore my dynfunctionality to church and even left half my coffee sitting on the kitchen counter undrunk. How counterproductive can you get?
Turns out there was an interesting person sitting next to me in the pew, and we had a nice conversation after church about, of all things, fitting in (or not) in a new community. We both have had varying experiences in moving from one part of the country to another - Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kansas - and found that in some places you have to go back three generations to really belong. Not so much in central Swingstate, which seems more accepting. And in most places, people can spot an outsider a mile away, and once you open your mouth, forget it. Never try to mimic the dialect; folks know a fraud when they hear someone try too hard to talk like the locals.
Most of the afternoon I spent in blissful solitude pulling weeds, transplanting lemonbalm, yarrow, hosta, and salvia, making lentil soup in the crock pot, and burning the brown rice. John and Yoko's song "Isolation" (from the Plastic Ono Band) was running through my self-indulgent head, but I'll get over it. Jessi called from Connecticut, where he's been meeting Alex's family. Just before dark I uncorked the white wine that was meant for the party, poured a glass for Gven, Helga, and myself, and unwound on the patio reading the Sunday paper. Helga made a nice quiche, basmati rice, and some outstanding oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in the uncooperative oven. Gven gave me a Paul Klee print, a couple of cool binding tools - an awl, some linen thread, and a burnishing stone - and a book about book-binding. Awl's well that ends well?
Monday, June 19, 2006
animaldads
The National Wildlife Federation has published a clever little article about selected fathers in the animal kingdom that it finds exemplary. I'm not sure I concur with all their criteria for "good" fathers, but it's a cool article.
In a similar vein, Rev. Susan took the Kierkegaardian approach to discussing fathersday by retelling a lesser-known part of the Abraham story from Genesis, before Isaac is even conceived, where Abram (still a young man, not yet a patriarch) has to do some violent, rough business in order to make a serious deal with a major authority figure, having lasting consequences for his people. She called it the yang that completes the yin of the emotionally present, nurturing father. I appreciated that.
Despite the need for the softening of the definition of fatherhood that has taken place in the last 150 years, there is still stern stuff involved in being the dad. I'll try to avoid oversimplification and just say a good father works in all seven chakras, from brutal survival through providing materially, imparting power, caring, nurturing, communicating a voice and a vision, and something else again that shall go nameless because I don't know what to call it.
Gven and I watched almost at random - I swear it wasn't planned, the DVD was just sitting there - a fine movie by Barry Levinson called "Liberty Avenue" Saturday night with beautiful performances by Joe Montegna, Bebe Neuwirth, Adrian Brody, and a couple of young actors whose names I don't recall. It's a coming-of-age story about two brothers set against the backdrop of their father's business problems in multi-racial, multi-cultural Baltimore, circa 1954. In short, they're all learning to deal with being Jews and getting along with the goy power structure, proud assimilating blacks, proud street blacks, each other, antisemitism, racism, and McCarthyism. Dad (Montegna) comes across as a smart, tough-as-nails businessman who goes to temple, likes to dance, drives a brand new Cadillac, demands (and shows) respect.
So don't give me no Hallmark Card strong but gentle Disneyfied father figure, and don't give me no sanitized always there for me nurturing wildlife stud who stands by protecting the eggs while the mama lizard goes out with the girls. We're all animals, and some of us are animaldads, and I'd rather not idealize the breed.
In a similar vein, Rev. Susan took the Kierkegaardian approach to discussing fathersday by retelling a lesser-known part of the Abraham story from Genesis, before Isaac is even conceived, where Abram (still a young man, not yet a patriarch) has to do some violent, rough business in order to make a serious deal with a major authority figure, having lasting consequences for his people. She called it the yang that completes the yin of the emotionally present, nurturing father. I appreciated that.
Despite the need for the softening of the definition of fatherhood that has taken place in the last 150 years, there is still stern stuff involved in being the dad. I'll try to avoid oversimplification and just say a good father works in all seven chakras, from brutal survival through providing materially, imparting power, caring, nurturing, communicating a voice and a vision, and something else again that shall go nameless because I don't know what to call it.
Gven and I watched almost at random - I swear it wasn't planned, the DVD was just sitting there - a fine movie by Barry Levinson called "Liberty Avenue" Saturday night with beautiful performances by Joe Montegna, Bebe Neuwirth, Adrian Brody, and a couple of young actors whose names I don't recall. It's a coming-of-age story about two brothers set against the backdrop of their father's business problems in multi-racial, multi-cultural Baltimore, circa 1954. In short, they're all learning to deal with being Jews and getting along with the goy power structure, proud assimilating blacks, proud street blacks, each other, antisemitism, racism, and McCarthyism. Dad (Montegna) comes across as a smart, tough-as-nails businessman who goes to temple, likes to dance, drives a brand new Cadillac, demands (and shows) respect.
So don't give me no Hallmark Card strong but gentle Disneyfied father figure, and don't give me no sanitized always there for me nurturing wildlife stud who stands by protecting the eggs while the mama lizard goes out with the girls. We're all animals, and some of us are animaldads, and I'd rather not idealize the breed.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Z³
In this week's episode of "Helga Golly, ADP Intern" we discover that our hero(ine) has a cubicle! That's right, her temporary "desk" at the far end of the second floor overlooking the scenic I-71 northbound on-ramp construction is someone else's purgatory now, and Helga - whose real name is Zoe, by the way, hence the title - has moved into a cube vacated by some departed art and photo person.
She's in the game; she's in the neighborhood; she's ensconced.
So what's all the fuss? I'm codependent; I'm a hovering nuisance; I'm her dad.
She's in the game; she's in the neighborhood; she's ensconced.
So what's all the fuss? I'm codependent; I'm a hovering nuisance; I'm her dad.
Friday, June 02, 2006
Fits and starts
It's how I work. Or it's a neurological condition. Or maybe it's how I work due to a neurological condition that allows impulses to traverse the fibers of my body intermittently rather than continuously, electrons leaping from axons to dentrites like lemmings off a cliff. Or I could have...
Restless Leg Syndrome.
Yeah, I think that's it.
Restless Leg Syndrome.
Yeah, I think that's it.
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