The Red Car

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Charles

Beltane                                                           Beltane Moon

18 years ago Kate and I walked into the Toyota showroom, looking for a car to replace my old blue Volvo station wagon.  It wasn’t sturdy enough to do five days a week in and back to St. Paul, carting Joseph into first Ramsey Junior High, then St. Paul Central.  We intended to buy something sensible, practical.

Instead we walked out proud owners of a 1995 Celica.  Joseph and I shared rides in this car all through junior high and high school.  A lot of our growing up together happened in it.

The very first month we owned it, the engine started running rough.  I took it back to the dealer, Carlson Toyota, and had them take a look.  The mechanic showed me two spark plug wires, chewed completely through by mice who had taken up the engine as a warm home for the winter.

Over the years I’ve replaced head gaskets, head lights, batteries, tires and in one extreme case, something that I can’t recall, but I do remember it blew out on I-25, just outside Pueblo, Colorado on one hell of a hot day, necessitating an over night in Pueblo while the part came to town.

Now, it’s too expensive to have two cars and it doesn’t work so well in the winter.  So, it has to go.  We’re donating it to Courage Center so it can have a graceful and purposeful exit.

Still, I’m sad.  I’d hoped it could make it to 300,000.  Just because.  Got close.  That’s a lot of miles with one vehicle, over a period of 18 years.  Not all put on by me, but most of them by far.

It was a great car and I’ll miss it.

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Bee Diary: Hive Inspection May 18 2012

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Charles
smoke in the hole may 2012 1000

This gallery contains 7 photos.

Beltane                                                        Beltane Moon

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Come Bearing Gifts

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Charles

Beltane                                                                     Beltane Moon

Kate made a purse, two hot pads and a market bag as gifts for Nicoletta’s family.  The hot pads have a map of the US with Minnesota on it and one with Minnesota with Andover marked.  She’s also making a gift for a three year old niece who lives with Nicoletta’s parents, too.

We wanted gifts with an indigenous American feel, something home made, not fancy.  Kate’s hit it right on the head.

Talked to Joseph last night; he suggested blue jeans and regular shirts, nothing fancy.  Her dad’s a construction worker and the family lives in modest circumstances.  He says visiting them is a lot like going to a cabin up north.

My Berlitz phrase book came yesterday and I’ve begun to learn the greetings.  Good-bye is  la revedere = la revedereh.  A lot of the letters can take accent marks which change pronunciations in ways very unfamiliar to an English speaker.

Brother Mark told him to take care at ATM’s because Romania is (according to him, and he travels widely) known for ATM scams.  Hide the pin number, he said.

 

 

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Grand Tours

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Charles

Beltane                                                                              Beltane Moon

Tour at 10:00 AM.  Sophomore honor students from Hastings, Minnesota.  We looked at sculpture by MCAD trained sculptor, John Flannagan.  A late Monet painted in his Japanese garden after his eyesight had begun to fail.  A late Matisse, Pensees, a pretty picture, not important in his oeuvre, but beautiful on its own.  We dissected Picasso’s Woman With Armchair, then looked at the painted puzzle by Magritte, investigated Henry Moore’s Warrior With Shield and talked about photorealism with Frank.

This was a smart, thoughtful group of teenagers.  They had fun, had ideas, were familiar with art.

At noon I had a group of 3rd graders from Fairmont Elementary.  The first three objects to which I took them, “We’ve already seen this.”  Hmmm.  This was an odd situation since the same group of kids had the same docents with the same tour theme.  So.

I noticed they had a laminated card with particular paintings they needed to check off.  ”May I see that?”  We then went on a treasure hunt to find the remaining paintings or objects they hadn’t seen.  We had a good time, ending at the Wu Family Reception Hall.  Which, of course, they had already seen.  Sigh.

After that a fun continuing education with improv performers on temporary staff with the MIA.  They’re bringing improv techniques to many different aspects of the museum.  It was fun and reminded me that once I had been an actor.  And not a bad one.

 

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Beltane                                                              Beltane Moon

Getting to do things ticked off as my trip to Romania goes onto the one week mark tomorrow.  Made sure my debit card will work.  Got new PIN #.  Found a three-pronged plug and a step-down converter to take the Romanian 220 down to 110.  That means I can take my phone and my netbook with me.  I’m still not sure about how to handle the phone; that is, I don’t want an $8,000 bill when I get back thanks to data roaming charges.  Nothing I’ve read so far makes much sense to me.

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Charles | Leave a comment

one for my docent friends. “What do you see that makes you say that?”

 

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Our Get Up and Go

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Charles

Beltane                                                                     Beltane Moon

The business side of family life.  Into St. Paul to see the woman that saved our financial bacon almost ten years ago.  Ruth Hayden has been a blessing, getting us turned around and onto a positive money path.  With her help Kate’s retirement will happen as scheduled and with a sense of security.

Kate and I have some cogitating to do.  We have to wrap our heads around the long retirement, the time from here until the end.  And paying for it.  Under most, probably all, circumstances we’ll have a roof, food, and money for the other incidental expenses.  We will not, however, have enough money to get us where we want to go.

Literally.  Like, China.  Singapore.  Egypt.  Around the US by train.  New England.  Churchill, Ontario for the polar bears.  Alaska.  Back to Europe.  Well, you get the picture.

This reality is, as Ruth puts it, the rigidity of retirement.  Without new sources of income our flexibility has diminished in terms of this kind of travel.  We’ve already put a ban on traveling together since it costs too much to board the dogs.

Please note I’m not whining here.  We made the choices that got us into a retirement with a sufficient income stream and we’re both happy and relieved at that.  More than many will have and we will have enough to do everything else we’ve always done.  Just not that icing, the whipped cream.

My family has a built in go-gene.  You can tell that by the fact that Mark and Mary have lived virtually all of their adult lives outside the US.  I have the same gene, but made different choices when younger.  Got married.  And then married with child.  Then married with a step-child.  So, two children and now a wife for good and all, to death do us part.

The fact is, from my side, that had I not married Kate I would probably not have done any of the international travel we’ve done or much less.  We honeymooned for three weeks in Europe, advancing north by Eur-rail following spring all the way from Rome to Inverness, Scotland.  We spent three weeks in Mexico:  Mexico City, Oaxaca and Merida.  We’ve been to Hawai’i many times.  In 1999 we went to China and in 2004 I went to Southeast Asia.  And, of course, we got back on Thanksgiving day last year from a circumnavigation of South America.  In addition I spent a week in Bogota.

Oh. Yeah.  That trip to the Aegean, from Rome to Istanbul.  Forgot that one.  A good one, too.  I know.  Nothing to complain about, eh?

Compared to Mark and Mary I’ve barely gotten started.  They’ve been all over the world.  The most impressive trips to me being Mark’s trek across Russia by the Trans-siberian railroad and Mary’s journeys to India and Tibet.

Still, travel does not have to be to the far-away, the exotic or the unusual.  There are places to go in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Canada.  And that boy will be in Europe I imagine for quite a while.  Joseph I mean and his next assignment.

Working this out here on the page, reconciling myself.  Putting it out there.  Anyhow.

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Alonzo Stagg Stadium 1969

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Charles

Beltane                                                                 Beltane Moon

Working on tours today.  Discovered a sculpture by Henry Moore that I inhabited once, long ago, the year 1969.  Just south of Kenwood Avenue my then wife’s brother, Bob Merritt, lived in a large flat with other undergraduates attending the University of Chicago.

Kenwood marked the dividing line between Hyde Park, the upper middle class enclave gathered around the University and the South Side.  The South Side, known for gangs and poverty and community organizers began at their building.  So much so that one evening a gang of thieves with shotguns held all the students while they robbed the apartment.  Didn’t get much.  University students?  Geez.

As a guest, I joined in a big weekend party that had plenty of drugs, sex and rock and roll.  No sex for me.  Married.  But drugs?  Oh, yes, please.  Mescaline, cut at the time with strychnine for a faster rush.  We sat around on mattresses on the floor, classic college student high decor.  At one point I leaned against a bare wire and got an electric shock.

Oh. Boy.  That lit me up inside and out.

Later on we decided to get something to eat and went for a stroll around campus, near Billings Hospital.   Alonzo Stagg stadium where Enrico Fermi first split the atom.  Used to be right there.  Fermi and others under stadium.  Playing with an energy source known only to Shiva at that time.  In a container enclosed with regular bricks, if I recall correctly.

There, on the site of Fermi’s experiment sat this sculpture by Henry Moore.  Taken by the explanation of its purpose, I crawled up inside and sat there, mind altered by the mescaline molecules, imagining the splitting of the atom, down to a very fine detail.  I inhabited the split, a part of it, riding the cascading protons and neutrons and electrons.  I forgot about the food, about the evening.  I sat there for quite a while, back in Alonzo Stagg stadium, as Fermi worked his magic.

Later on I walked back to the flat.

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Our Bodies Break Light

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Charles

Beltane                                                   Beltane Moon

Our Bodies Break Light
by Traci Brimhall

We crawl through the tall grass and idle light,

our chests against the earth so we can hear the river

underground. Our backs carry rotting wood and books

that hold no stories of damnation or miracles.

One day as we listen for water, we find a beekeeper—

one eye pearled by a cataract, the other cut out by his own hand

so he might know both types of blindness. When we stand

in front of him, he says we are prisms breaking light into color—

our right shoulders red, our left hips a wavering indigo.

His apiaries are empty except for dead queens, and he sits

on his quiet boxes humming as he licks honey from the bodies

of drones. He tells me he smelled my southern skin for miles,

says the graveyard is full of dead prophets. To you, he presents

his arms, tattooed with songs slave catchers whistle

as they unleash the dogs. He lets you see the burns on his chest

from the time he set fire to boats and pushed them out to sea.

You ask why no one believes in madness anymore,

and he tells you stars need a darkness to see themselves by.

When you ask about resurrection, he says, How can you doubt?

and shows you a deer licking salt from a lynched man’s palm.

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A Thought, A Sigh

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Charles

Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

All day.  A thought comes.  A sigh, hoping to delve into, oh, say, renaissance humanism.  Dive in and just stay there until all there is to absorb crawls inside my skin and remains.  Or, maybe Romania.  Wondering just how the Slavic countries ended up north and south of Romania-Hungary-Austria.  Here’s another part of the world about which I know almost nothing.

Later, watching Kate, seeing her sinking back into a life without paid work, a sense of relaxation, of being at home.  At last.

Looking at the Google art.  A kris.  A southeast Asia blade with a wavy, not straight edge.  Indonesia.  Again, a country with a population comparable to the US and lots of islands, but, again, not much is in my head about it.  A little.  Bali.  Krakatoa.  Suharto.  My god, it has 17508 islands.

Lyndon Johnson.  In the first volume of Robert Caro’s four volume (so far) biography.  He dominates, pushes, acts out against his parents.  The hill country of texas.  A difficult place, a trap for the unwary.  Most of the people who lived there.

The dogs.  At the vet.  18 years to the same vet.  Many dogs, all panting, all nervous.  Rigel, Vega and Kona today.  Rigel and Vega, sweet dogs.  Kona more aloof.  A grand dame.

Irrigation overhead busted in the southern vegetable garden.  Pulled loose from the pcv that feeds it water.  Have to fix it.  Plant more collards and beets.  I’ve touched most of the plants here, memories.  Buying them at Green Barn.  Digging a spot for them.  Pouring water on them.  Over the years, 18, lots of plants, thousands.  One at a time.  In the soil.  Maybe pick it up and move it or divide it.  That sense of a deep, long connection.

Dream of the Red Chamber.  Chinese literature, the third classic of the four major ones.  Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Monkeys Journey to the West. Sinking into the rhythms of another culture.  Reading it on the Kindle.  Odd juxtaposition of past and present.

(image protected  original by Ivan Walsh)

Now, tired.  Smelling the lilacs Kate brought me.  Thinking of sleep.

 

 

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