Ah. The divorce has moved on to more sane grounds. Looks like Jon and Jen may be able to work out their differences. There’s nothing easy about divorce, having done it twice. It involves pain and rupture, the death of love, moving, lawyers, the legal system. Kids have no power and get confused, angry. Just like the adults only worse.
No truly amicable path leads out of a marriage. But. When the two former lovers and friends can agree on something more than their mutual pain, like the ongoing well-being of their children, or the need for both to leave the marriage intact and able to pursue a new life, then sensible decisions can get made. Lives zippered together can slowly separate, ease out of the old and into the new.
I can see this process beginning to unfold for Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe. It makes me glad, for a long, acrimonious struggle enervates everyone involved and makes the next phase of life even more difficult than it needs to be. Still a long time ahead for this family, but I’m hopeful now.
It’s Sunday. We’ll head out in a bit for our business meeting, going somewhere nearby for breakfast. This is a routine, weekly. These meetings where we discuss money matters, calendar, upcoming projects, how we’re doing are an important part of our marriage. They prevent issues that could divide us or surprise us from sneaking into our lives. In a sense they’re the board meeting for our marriage in its quasi-corporate aspect, but more than that they are a commitment to open discussion, to mutual decision making, to the sort of hard headed pragmatism I believe many people around the world see in American culture. Thanks to Ruth Hayden.
The sprint that started after we got back from Asia with Vega’s sudden, fatal illness, then the copyright infringement legal problem and the subsequent expunging of images from Ancientrails, followed by three weeks or so of fire mitigation is nearly over. Cleaning out the garage and organizing it, clearing off the swedish shelving in the house and getting the china cabinet upstairs into the guest room will be the last of it. Then I will get back to Latin, to Jennie’s Dead and Superior Wolf, and reimagining faith. That is, I’ll get back to working on them in the mornings.
Today is the power outage, scheduled to begin in half an hour. A damaged Xcel transmission line has to get repaired. Pinecam.com has been abuzz. Bad IREA folks for not posting a map of the affected area.
Weird phenomenon. Because folks who got the letters or phone calls from IREA knew about the outage two or so weeks ago they posted about it on Pinecam. Then, those who had not gotten letters or phone calls began to worry that they, too, were affected and had not been told. This went from suspicion to certainty with demands to do it on another date or at night. At night?
Turns out IREA had not posted a map so crooks couldn’t use it as a reference for break-ins. And, no letter or no call, no outage. Oh. Everybody calmed down.
Apparently, at least according to Seth who installs solar panels, when the grid goes down, the solar does not pick up the slack. Just why I’m not sure, but I’m waiting for the event to find out. Nothing like an empirical test. Anyhow, since we have a generator, we should be fine, but it’s not been used since Patrick worked on it back in January or so. A test for it, too. Maybe.
Meanwhile Tyler is coming today to finish removing the slash, not much left. When he’s done with that, he and I will stack all the logs bucked for Seth and Hannah into short piles so those two can get them easily. That will mark the end of this phase of fire mitigation. There are other matters, but they will wait awhile. I’m tired of the lumberjack life right now. Literally. Tired to the bone from it.
Ruth and Gabe come up last night. We have them through Friday afternoon. This is our first time with them since the divorce news. We’re very glad to see them and will provide a point of stability and love. A hard time for kids since they need to sort all this stuff out, too.
Some hiking for Ruth and me, a trip to Dinosaur Ridge, then a picnic at Red Rock Ampitheater today or tomorrow. Gabe had a bad bleed a couple of weeks ago and his physical therapist told him no running or jumping until July! He’s 8. That’s a tough restriction. The problem is that if this bleed gets exacerbated and recurs it can become a continuing problem. For life. High stakes for a young child.
Well, fourteen minutes to lights out. I’ll let you know.
“So you try to remain calm and remember your training. Not easy to do as you use the last t-shirt that came home in the box with your nephew from Iraq to try to keep the inside of his head where it belongs.”
“Meantime help from the young man that caused the incident is running around getting in the way crying ‘Please don’t let him die, I didn’t see him. Please don’t let him die’. Tried to be nice but had to tell him to get the f out of the way.”
“Was trying to figure out how to make an airway out of Pepsi bottle or something when he slipped away, as the fire department pulled up.”
Redneck for Hire, Pinecam.com
Life. Like the flickering of a firefly or a summer breeze passing through a mountain meadow. We have it, then we don’t. Tyler, my young helper who will be a junior next year at Conifer High School, had an uncle killed in a motorcycle accident on Highway 285, Saturday. Pinecam.com, that smalltown breakfast joint of a website, had several entries talking about the accident.
One, from a poster who takes the handle Redneck for Hire, was very poignant. He has EMT training and was on the scene before Elk Creek Fire Department. Tyler’s uncle died in his arms while he tried to remember something he could do to help. What was an abstracted source of hometown news became personal, even for me, though only in this tangential way. It’s the slow integration of our life with the lives of others who live near us.
Driveway the day we got home from Korea. Eduardo and Holly cleared it.
Our neighbor Holly is still in California, having had thyroid cancer surgery at Scripps in San Diego. Eduardo worked on the family beach house outside Tijuana. His father has late stage Alzheimer’s and the beach house is a place for him to enjoy. The two of them cleared our driveway before our return from Korea.
Next door neighbor Jude’s dogs are quieter, the front yard neater. He has a woman friend who has moved in. Jude was fired from his job as a shift supervisor at a casino in Blackhawk about a year ago. He returned to the welding business of his father, having worked there before. Now, he says, he’s so much happier. Glad he was fired.
Jon and Jen are in the early stages of a divorce. Painful news in so many ways. Yet, having been there myself, I know that once a relationship sours the way back can close down forever. Made more difficult of course by Gabe’s hemophilia and both Ruth and Gabe’s gifted, but troubled personalities. As grandparents we’re very limited in what we can do other than that most important thing: love them all, through it all and afterwards.
You might consider this an OMG moment for us since we moved out here to be closer to the grandkids and Jon and Jen. To the contrary. It makes the move make even more sense. We have a chance to be of real assistance, up close. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Jon already. Nodding. Listening. Reassuring. We will be here.
Yes. life is a firefly flickering or a summer breeze across a mountain meadow, but while it flickers, while the breeze blows, what an amazing experience.
No lumberjacking today. This old body needed time to recoup. Back at it tomorrow.
The elliptical we bought has spared my knee the throbbing and swelling of high intensity workouts on the treadmill. I can now do the same workout, but in a fluid, joint friendly motion. The old P90X workouts help round out the return to serious muscle and cardio-vascular exercise.
Took Kep over to Award Winning Pet Grooming in Bailey. Bailey is to the west on Highway 285. It’s the big city in Park County at 8, 859 souls. Amanda Gordon has defurred Kep several times as the alternating hotter and colder weather of this year’s El Nino winter has caused dogs all over the front range to blow their coats. This was probably Kep’s last visit to Award Winning since he will head to Georgia, early July. Kate and I both will go.
Kate’s been gardening today. She’s wanted to do some, finally decided to just do it. Her friend Hannah and her husband Seth ate lunch with Kate. They cleared out most of the logs in the front. There are about twice as many in the back, maybe 3 times as many.
A sleety snow this morning, 36 degrees. Will turn back into rain as the day heats up.
Gertie goes in today to get her e-collar off and her drain removed. She’s already back to her energetic self and is eager to run free. Hopefully, not into more slash. We moved all the slash that was close to the house yesterday and the day before, so hopefully she’ll remain unpunctured until we get done.
Have spent no time catching up on the Indy 500 this year. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut, born in Indianapolis, who said Indiana living involved basketball season and waiting for the Indy 500. Not far off.
Heard from Joe. He and Seoah are legally married now, having filed their papers with the Korean court system. That means they can now go to the US embassy and begin the visa process. It’s different for a married couple and they had to wait until the legal completion of their marriage. They go June 8.
Ever since the great iconoclasm, my voice has been muted. Not sure why. Topics don’t seem to occur to me. I’ve never had a theme, a particular ax, though felling and limbing the occasional political issue shows up once in awhile. Philosophical, quasi-theological pondering. That, too. Lots of did this, did that. The online continuation of a journal keeping way I’ve had for decades. Art. Yes, but not as much as I want.
Maybe there was a more intimate link between the images and the vitality of this blog than I realized. Apres le mitigation the whole copyright issue, the fate of images in an age of digital reproduction, will occupy some of my time.
Work on both Superior Wolf and Jennie’s Dead have been ongoing, though not yet much writing. Reimagining Faith occupies a lot of my free thinking time, wondering about mountains, about urbanization, about clouds that curve and mound above Mt. Evan’s, our weather maker. No Latin yet. Not until I can have regular time up here in the loft. Not yet.
Could be that underneath all this lies a reshuffling of priorities or a confirmation of old ones. It’s not yet a year since my prostate surgery and a friend of mine said it took her a year to feel right again. This year has felt in some ways like my first year here, a year when I can take in the mountain spring, the running creeks, the willows and their blaze of yellow green that lights up the creek beds, the mule deer and elk following the greening of the mountain meadows.
My 40 year fondness for Minnesota has also begun to reemerge, not in a nostalgic, wish I was still there way, but as a place I know well, a place to which I did become native, a place which shaped me with its lakes, the Mississippi, Lake Superior, wolves and moose and ravens and loons. Where Kate and I became as close as we could with the land we held temporarily as our own. Friends. Art. Theatre. Music. Family. Perhaps a bit like the old country, an emigre’s memories which help shape life in the new land. An anchor, a source of known stability amidst a whirl of difference. The West. Mountains. Family life.
So. There was something in there anyhow. Now, back to fire mitigation.
Into Denver last night for a burger with Jon at Park Burger on Holly. Park Burger is fancy, in a high modernist way. Lots of angles, metal, television screens. It sits in the middle of an upscale Jewish community near Cherry Creek, one of the tonier neighborhoods in the Denver metro.
Its menu reflects its setting. Not just cheeseburgers and cheeseburgers with bacon. You can get a third pound lamb burger, an ahi tuna burger, and, among many others, a Scarpone burger. This has pancetta, giardiniera, olives and a wonderful flavored mayonnaise. A stick to your veins sort of meal.
Even with its polyurethane covered pine table tops, hip waiters and list of interesting milkshakes, Park Burger does not match Matt’s on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis. The Juicy Lucy, often imitated but never well, may be Matt’s sole claim to burger fame, but it’s a solid one. Matt’s also has the distinctive patina only neighborhood bars and cafes get, the Velveteen Rabbit affect. It’s a real place, a place to have a beer and a burger with friends. Park Burger is too shiny and bright and new. It’s a place just recently brought home from the toy store, button eyes, cloth covering and all limbs still intact. It’s not real. Not yet.
Jon showed me photographs of his students’ art work. Some of it is sophisticated. An example was a print of two spoons, what Jon calls object printing. He’s developing this technique right now in his art and has some of his students doing it, too. He uses found objects, like crushed soda cans, parts fallen off cars, a guitar, a crushed metal folding chair. These get cleaned off, then covered with ink and run through his press. The result is a monoprint with unusual depth, contours, shapes.
His student took two spoons, covered one lightly with brown ink and another with a light blue. As he printed them, the light brown ink created a ghostly impression of its spoon, while the other slipped a bit in the press and created a tail, a swoosh of light blue ink behind the even fainter impression of the spoon. The result is dynamic. Maybe beautiful. A fifth grader if I recall right.
This last round of snow, ice and colder weather got a lot of grumbles. Fortunately, we didn’t get the 5 inches predicted and the roadways were warm enough to melt what fell, but the part of our bodies that wants blue skies and somewhat warmer temperatures felt cheated. Not rational, I know. And the snow was pretty as always. But still.
Today Dr. Repine gets a look at my eyeballs, a glaucoma check, and a refraction. Might produce new reading lenses. After that we’re going to Whistling Duck, a carpentry shop specializing in beetle kill/blue pine. Our upstairs dining is still on the round bar table we bought as a temporary measure the month we moved in.
Life’s been eventful since our return from Asia with Vega’s death, the legal wrassling and the reluctant iconoclast moment. There’s another major event swirling in our lives right now, too, one I can’t write about openly yet. Not a health issue, not about Shadow Mountain or any of its residents.
Last night I got glimpses into the way forward on both Jennie’s Dead and Superior Wolf. That means my creative mind has emerged from the fog of image expunging. The Superior Wolf concept pushed me back to the origin idea, made me see that the way forward lay in the mythos, starting the story at the beginning. Solving a way for a magician to pull off a remarkable trick pushes the storyline of Jennie’s Dead past a road block. Feels good.
