Category Archives: Family

Aging, Family, Feelings, Health, Memories, Science

I heart heart

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Beltane                                                                           Running Creeks Moon

Raffles Town Club breakfast: Singapore
Raffles Town Club breakfast: Singapore

The things life splices together. Yesterday Kate had an appointment with her cardiologist. I went with her. She showed me the report of her echocardiogram, we discussed the cardiologist’s finding. All very clinical. Yes, the heart is a muscle and one which can be graded and observed at many levels. It has ejection fractions. leaflets, diffusions and profusions, valves and chambers. The fine tuning of the heart’s care is a substantial branch of medicine.

On the bus to Gwangju
On the bus to Gwangju

The heart is also, and perhaps more importantly, a metaphor. For love. For feeling. For courage and persistence. For essence. For intimacy. The metaphor can, too, be graded and observed at many levels. Heartless bastard. In my heart. I heart NYC, you, my dog, my honor school student, my rifle, my concealed carry handgun. That gets right to the heart of things. My heart is heavy. You have heart. My heart belongs to you.

Why might the metaphor be more important than the muscle? Because love lives on past the stilling of the muscle. Kate and I spliced together the cardiologist appointment with a visit to DazzleJazz, hearing the Keith Oxman quartet and Dr. Diva, a singing professor from Nebraska. We sat next to each other, she rested her head on my shoulder. We whispered and touched. My heart belongs to her. And that muscle so closely examined a few hours before? No match for her true heart, the one that belongs to me.

BTW: usual aging heart stuff for Kate. Blood pressure meds now. Attention to diet, keep up with the tai chi. Some upper body resistance work. We can push back against the dying of the light, but it goes out anyhow. Something, sometime. Yet love remains.

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate, Writing

This, that

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Beltane                                                                       Running Creeks Moon

Front, May 6th
Front, May 6th

The snow is mostly gone in the front, south facing yard. In the back though there are still long drifts of snow punctuated by even larger patches of soil, rock and the tufty grass we have up here on Shadow Mountain. The days are warmer but the nights remain cool. They will remain relatively cool and dry even during the summer.

I’ve had a time consuming blog related project that has eaten up days of time and is not done yet. It has given me an opportunity to go back over all the wordpress entries: 2016-2007, which has been fascinating. Some 8,000+ now.

Back, May 9
Back, May 9

Kate has Bailey Patchworkers, a sewing/quilting group, today and will make a run to the Happy Camper for cbds. My elliptical comes this morning. I’ll be able to get back to working out at a high intensity with the elliptical’s knee joint friendly motion. The treadmill will stay for walking at a moderate pace.

Once this blog project is over I plan to start regular hikes in the woods and a return to the fire mitigation work I began last fall. Kate is currently doing cross stitch for a very cute baby blanket. The baby blanket comes, naturally, after the wedding quilt.

Much to my chagrin, since I stopped adding salt to my meals, my weight has dropped, my blood pressure has dropped and I’m sleeping much better. Of course, I’m happy with the improvements. Still. Imagine me slapping my forehead with my hand.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Memories, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Mystic Chords

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Beltane                                                                               New (Running Creeks) Moon

The mood here. Still subdued, still gathering the reality of Vega’s death around us. When Mom died, now 52 years ago, the ongoingness of life surprised me. Cars still rattled down Canal Street. Lights went off and on in houses. School was open, teachers teaching and kids squirming at their desks. The sun rose and set. Dogs barked. We needed sleep and ate breakfast.

This no longer amazes me. The feelings of absence, of missing, of longing do not disappear however, though they can get submerged in the running creek of life. I still miss my mom, not in that acute, gut twisting way of 52 years ago, but longing for her, for her presence remains.

Abraham Lincoln called these threads of feeling and remembrance, their resonance, the mystic chords of memory. Yes. Part of their function, a paradox, lies in the quickening of our daily life, jimmying us out of the cracks and ruts we fall into. We realize a life time has bounds.

As the writers of the Hebrew scriptures often said, this background music is a blessing and a curse. It can become a cacophony, a dirge we cannot shut off. A mental tinnitus. Yet, it is the dead, as much as the living, often more, who shape us, create us-sometimes to our exasperation, other times to our joy.

With Vega the only source of pain is her sudden absence. The rest, the memory of her, the mystic chords she sets off, are joyful and loving. And those will persist.

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Family, GeekWorld, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Out There

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Beltane                                                     Wedding Moon

Ruth and I went to the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder on Saturday night for a program on black holes. Ruth had never been to a planetarium. The lights went down and the night sky appeared on the dome above us. The southern night sky. So, right away the wonder of the star machine. Then, the night sky over Boulder with the constellations. The astronomer talked about their correlation to the ancients who relied on them for agricultural purposes. It is reportedly spring. Somewhere.

Ruth watched and listened carefully. The short film on black holes was not easy, covering the birth of black holes, their peculiar physics and their role in the cosmos. After it was over, the astronomer walked us through some of the recent findings related to black holes, the most notable being the discovery of gravity waves at the LIGO observatory. The relation to black holes is that the gravity pulse detected at LIGO began in a black hole.

sloan image

It’s been a while since I immersed myself in matters astronomical. My fine grained understanding of the evening was not great. The hey now moment came at the end when the astronomer pulled the dome’s display further and further out until the entire Sloan Survey covered only the center of the dome.

The rest of the dome then represented the edge of the knowable universe. Out there the astronomer showed what he called the light wall, a here cooler, there warmer barrier of early light, earliest light, really. This light wall, a new idea to me, represented, he said, the exterior wall of the black hole within which our whole universe lives! Wow. Immediately sped past my understanding. Just did a little quick research on this and found nothing. Could be my hearing. Yet another sensory limitation when it comes to learning about the universe.

On the way out Ruth said she was expecting something like that at the end. Why? Because in the film they had presented black holes as violent, destructive forces, so in the end they’d need to show their good side. Not a scientific conclusion, but still a damned good one. I missed the setup and it was there. Ruth is 10.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Why grief?

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Spring                                                         Wedding Moon

As you might expect, I’ve been thinking about death, about grief in the wake of Vega’s sudden death. In particular I’ve been wondering how I can have a grasp on my own death, no fear, but be so distressed at Vega’s.

Then, it occurred to me. In movie thrillers the torturers often open their usually neated packet of tools: knives, pliers, dental picks, pieces of bamboo with a flourish. Or, as in the Marathon Man, the dentist goes to work on you without anesthetic.  In many cases the torturee summons up inhuman courage or an anti-heroic defiance.

When the usual infliction of pain or disorientation fails, or when the torturer is portrayed as unusually sadistic, friends or colleagues or family members of the torturee are led into the room. Then the torturer goes to work on them. Seems effective in the movies I’ve seen.

Grief, at least in part, is because the universe is such a torturer. Not with malice, of course, but certainly with a sort of intention. Life has an endpoint and entropy sees that it arrives. So, it’s possible to have the notion of your own death sorted out while responding with agony to the grim torture of having your friends removed from the room .

Art and Culture, Asia, Family, Travel

Singapore, the last day

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Spring                                                         Wedding Moon

Yesterday, our last day in Singapore, was the usual packing, settling of accounts and the taxi ride to the airport. It also included a visit to the sky deck, the third of the three things I wanted to see. Nirvana exceeded my expectations, Skygreens fell far below them and the sky deck was in between. It was in between only because the park like aspect of it, which really interested me, was off limits to all but guests of the Sands Resort Hotel.

The views the sky deck provided of this island nation were, however, stunning. And, again, it was hot.

The night before we ate at the Singapore Cricket Club’s Padang Restaurant. Here is a photograph of the Cricket Club taken from the sky deck.

Singapore Cricket Club from Sky deck

The merlion is a primary symbol of Singapore.

merlion2

The lotus shaped Artscience Museum is in the foreground here. The Esplanade where we listened to the Sikh music is the hedgehog shapes in the upper right and the Cricket Club is to the upper left.

lotus flower, cricket club, esplanade

Finally, the sky deck park and the port beyond it.

sky deck and port

Asia, Cooking, Family, Travel

Eating

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Spring                                                        Wedding Moon

relish4A lot of our visit to Singapore has revolved around eating. Yesterday morning we met Anita.  Anita offered prayers at her temple for me during my prostate surgery last year, is a long time colleague of Mary’s. She’s writing a book about her community, Indians from Kerala but living for a long time in Singapore. We had breakfast at Relish, a restaurant close to Mary’s apartment.

Lunch was Mary, Kate and I at Miyabi, a Japanese restaurant on the second floor of the Raffles Town Club. Excellent food. Authentic Japanese decor and seating. One side room I noticed was named Fu Yu. Not shorthand, I’m sure, as it would be in English.

tanglin tavernIn the evening a friend of Mary’s treated us to a pub meal in the Tanglin Club, the oldest such club in Singapore, founded in 1865. The Tavern and Fireplace, where we ate, replicates an English pub. I had fish and chips with vinegar on the fries. Just right. These clubs began as old style English gentlemen’s clubs, a bit of home in the tropics. The Tanglin apparently was started for English rubber plantation owners and their colleagues.

hash hikingWe learned about Hash hiking from Mary’s friend. This partial headline from the Guardian gives you the central point: “…a club that takes drinking as seriously as running.” Here are two websites: the guardian article and one from expat go. Though it started in Malaysia among expats concerned about staying trim while drinking plenty of beer, it’s quirky style has given it an international presence.

Including, I discovered easily, several Colorado clubs.

 

Asia, Cooking, Family, Travel

Impressions

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Spring                                                   Wedding Moon

Ate last night at the Dining Room, the Raffles Town Club’s award winning “Western” restaurant. I asked Kate what she imagined made the restaurant “Western.” “Everything’s cooked.” Kate’s not a fan of raw anything.

I’m going to add more pictures from Nirvana (hey, you can take photographs in Nirvana!), but they’ll have to wait until I get back to Adobe Photoshop. The WordPress image manipulator seems confounded by their metaphysics. Or something.

A random thought. I read an interesting short article last month (which I will post at some point) about a transition one analyst saw as well underway. He pointed out that just as the authority of the church declined dramatically after the rise of nation states so now the authority of the nation states is declining dramatically as global corporations become more and more powerful. Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore are strong examples of his point: chaebols like Samsung and Hyundai impact Korean life, Hong Kong capitalists are holding off the powerful Central Committee of China and Singapore unabashedly runs itself for business interests. There’s a lot to chew on in this idea.

 

 

 

Asia, Cooking, Family, Travel

A hot time in the air-conditioned nation

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botanic gardensHave I mentioned that it’s hot here? Kate and I walked through the Botanic Gardens, very beautiful and close to my sister Mary’s apartment, to get to a tour bus stop. By the time we got to the right place we had soaked our t-shirts. The heat + high humidity is a challenge for both of us. And, today was cooler.

We stopped at the Botanic Gardens outdoor cafe and had cool drinks, sat under a fan. That helped. So did shopping at the excellent, and air conditioned, gift shop.

The hop-on bus tour took a couple of hours but it allowed us to see the highlights of Singapore. The bus had personalized ducts for its air conditioning. A good thing for both of us. We went down Orchard Road which is a main retail shop with vertical malls selling the same kind of luxury goods I mentioned as available in the Incheon and Hong Kong airports.

Marina ParkThe architecture is cutting edge modern with lots of angles, odd shapes, glass, polished metal and cut stone. Mary says a constant theme here is upgrading: buildings, civil engineering, education, business. The Marina Park development, which contains many whimsical modern buildings, is an example. The Singapore Flyer, a huge ferris wheel, a park set high above the street on three building towers, structures shaped like a lotus flower, a hedgehog, and an inverted whale skeleton all draw the eye.

violet-oon-singapore-bukit-timah1At the same time there is the historic part of Singapore which includes the grand Raffles Hotel, the Museum of Asian Art, China Town, the Botanic Gardens and the Peranakan neighborhood. This last reflects the particular architecture of the folks who were in Singapore the earliest. They have a beautiful ceramic tradition.

Back at the Raffles Town Club Kate and I left our things in our room and walked around the curved hallways on our floor to the Chinese restaurant. Dim sum and almond coated crispy chicken. Quite tasty.

This evening we’re going to a restaurant (picture above) that features cuisine of the Peranakan culture. Mary says the chef, Violet Oon (great name), is a local celebrity.

 

 

Asia, Family, Travel

Kaya Toast to Bugis Street

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Spring                                                                  Wedding Moon

Kaya_Toast_SetBreakfast at the Club. Kate had a British breakfast and I had kaya toast with soft boiled eggs. Kaya is a Singapore speciality, a sort of jam applied to buttered toast which is then folded or made into a sandwich. Our waiter was Katrich, a young, very dark skinned Indian. A Japanese couple ate congee, a business type snapped open his laptop after ordering and checked his phone, a large Indian man ate a large breakfast.  A quiet way to start the day.

kate on the downtown lineThen, a nap. Still pretty exhausted from yesterday’s southerly flight from Korea to near the equator. Did I mention it’s hot here? Oh, boy.

We went out to get some necessities, took the excellent subway, Stevens to Bugis and the walk from the Raffles Town Club to the Stevens station was brutal even though it was short. The subway was air conditioned. A young Chinese man tapped me on the shoulder and offered me his seat.  A moving LED sign enjoined travelers to help the children and elderly. Red seats with a campaign persona named Standup Stacey encouraged the same inside the train cars.

bugis-st-3In the way of traveling we went to Bugis Village, a “three-stories of air conditioned street shopping.” It took us over an hour, including lunch at a ramen restaurant, to find the real entrance. In that hour we both got overheated. Once we found it though it was a genuine Southeast Asian shopping experience. Stall after stall of varying goods like I Love Singapore t-shirts, plastic merlions, racks of women’s short-shorts, shoes and sandals, and the occasional food stall. Crowded, busy. Jostling. Fun.

Waiting now to go out to with Mary who has taught all day.