Category Archives: Family

Family, Travel

Border Towns

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Lughnasa                                                Lughnasa Moon

My brother Mark is the most widely traveled of the three Ellis siblings. So when he makes a statement like this one, “I like border towns and the mixed energy of two nations that swirl around them.” it makes me realize I’ve not got a lot of experience with border towns. Detroit and Windsor. That’s about it.

(bill for an event in the State Farm Arena, Hidalgo, Texas)

Mark’s in Hidalgo, Texas right now as a medical tourist, getting dental work done in Reynosa, Mexico, just across the border. He walks to the border from his motel, pays one U.S. dollar to cross on a pedestrian bridge and bang he’s transnational traveler.

His comment about border towns makes me want to visit a few, just to see what he means. I know he has experience of border towns between Thailand and Cambodia, gained because every three months or so he had to do a visa run while living in Bangkok. Others, I don’t know.

The anthropologist in me says, aha, diffusion. And yes, it would be strongest where two cultures meet, but where they are supported by different political and cultural norms, that is, across national borders. U.S. culture could effect Reynosa and Mexican culture effect Hidalgo, safe within their own cultural envelopes.

(Pinatas in Reynosa, Mexico)

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.

Family, Holidays

A Serging We Will Go

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Love is a funny thing. Made me enter my first bid on E-Bay for a machine I didn’t understand. Still don’t. And I won! Strange how much fun it can be to get somebody to take your money.

What was it? A serger. In this case a Bernina 1300 MDC with overlock stitches. I did enough research to know that having an overlock stitch was good. And that the price was more than reasonable.

The body of the serger came last Friday and its accessories came today. All to the receiving dock formerly known as “front porch.”  The arrival of the accessories occasioned a birthday week outing to the St. Cloud Sewing Center where the serger goes to the sergery for a spruce up and professional review.  Looked fine to me, but what do I know from serging?

On the way up to St. Cloud we ate at Russell’s in Big Lake, dining for the first time on dill pickle soup. It was very good. The entertainment was a young man trying to learn how to waterski slalom style and a gaggle of Canadian geese who paddled away from the shore in a straight line, maybe 10 birds altogether. From what I saw the geese knew what they were doing. The waterskier not so much.

The day was a northern summer ordinary miracle. On these days when the dewpoint is low, the clouds high and puffy, the sky blue and temperatures in the mid-seventies, each day feels as if it could go on forever, an Elysian field created just for those of us crazy enough to live Minnesota.

 

Commentary on the news, Family, Feelings, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Cloud Blocking The Sun

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

A word about depression. I’ve experienced melancholy and perhaps one bout of true depression, back in 1975 after my first divorce, but I know the real deal when I see it. As I think I’ve written here before, three of my aunts were manic-depressive. One aunt spent the bulk of her life in a mental hospital, another was in and out and the other starved herself to death. It’s a subtle beast, depression, not at all like the usual presentation of the slump shouldered, gloom faced lump in a chair.

No, the depressed person can push right up against life, engaging in work and social life, perhaps with less energy, but that’s often not noticeable. A mix of obligation, habit and denial can even make a depressed person seem normal, even to those closest to them. Robin Williams worked hard, it said in the paper today, in spite of his depression. This suggests that yesterday might have been different, worse than the other episodes of addiction and depression he suffered, but that may not be true.

This might be the time when the impulsive met the depressive, the time when, just for a terrible moment, the idea of death outweighed the struggle for life. It could be that had someone accidentally interrupted this moment he could still be working today. This is not at all blaming someone else, rather I’m pointing to the deadly consequence of entertaining, even for a moment, the notion of self-extinction.

Yes, existentialists, and I count myself among them, see suicide as a possible affirmative choice in a meaningless world. If life has become unbearable, for whatever reason, the decision to end it needs to be taken seriously, not discounted or abjured. And perhaps especially because I feel this way I’m sensitive to the effects of a momentary mood, a flight of dark fantasy, that may have irrevocable results. These moods are not the same as an existential choice, being overtaken by a feeling of worthlessness or dead-endedness is not a choice; rather, these are situations of capture when the self becomes hostage and even victim to psychic weather.

Moods, as the weather systems of the psyche, have great power and in our interior world we often mistake weather for climate. That is, we take the mood as indicative of a general state of existence, when it is really a thunder shower or a cloud blocking the sun.

We humans, and our lives, are so fragile, so vulnerable.

Cooking, Family, Holidays, Music

Three Score and Ten. And jazz.

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Lughnasa                                                                   Lughnasa Moon

We celebrated Kate’s 70th tonight, 8 days ahead of her August 18th birthday. Down Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 is a town called Hastings with a new bridge over the Mississippi, two graceful arches painted orange and lit at night. Across the bridge and beyond Hastings is the Alexis Bailly vineyard, founded in 1973 by a Twin Cities’ attorney.

Tonight, as it has done for four years now, KBEM joined with Nan Bailly, daughter of Alexis, to sponsor an evening of jazz and locally sourced food. Nan’s vineyards are green, healthy appearing and the building her father built (picture below) houses a small store and a wine bar.

Behind the building is an area with carved boulder seats, contemporary metal sculpture scattered among native prairie and a spot where KBEM put up a large white tent and several long tables.

The chef for the event, Stan Patalonis, put together a Latin menu with beginners that featured Spanish flavors then moved onto Latin America. The food was good, the wine plentiful and the jazz mellow. A suite of clouds gave us a cooler evening, just right in the mid-70’s, and the rain held off until the meal was done.

Kate enjoyed the wine and her birthday celebration. We drove home along the river, then up 280 and 35E and 10 to Round Lake Boulevard. 70 is a landmark birthday and so was this evening.

Colorado, Family, The Move

Saturday’s Way

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Lughnasa                                                                             Lughnasa Moon

We had our business meeting this morning at Keys. Seated in the same booth where Mark Odegard and I ate breakfast yesterday. Odd, like a movie set where the scene remains the same, but the actors and the movie itself change.

We reviewed our finances as we always do. We’re still above water and likely to stay that way unless we get a real desire to cruise the world. (which, I admit, I have, but at a manageable level. For now.) We looked at the calendar, a blessedly uncluttered one which gives us time to pack, garden and patch that leaky chain link fence.

Now that the initial spike of house hunting fever has waned, we’re focused on the mundane. Get the boxes. Fill them. Decide on what work needs doing and getting it done.

There is an odd combination of anticipation and resistance, both of which make sense to me at this point. We anticipate the move as if it’s already happened and resist the work necessary to make it happen. But then, since we’re adults, we pick up the books, take them off the shelves and place them in the Jack Daniels box and the Sky Vodka box and and the Captain Morgan Rum box. We are moving the drinking habits of the Andover area to Colorado.

 

 

 

 

Family, Feelings, Memories

What Lies Beneath?

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

Clearing out files this morning. When I came to a group of dog related files, vet records, 1000P1030765pedigrees, lure coursing material, I got stopped for a while. In Sortia’s file, our second Irish Wolfhound, a black bitch that weighed 150 pounds, I found a letter from the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital. Sortia was euthanized there against our wishes during an overnight stay.

(Rigel and Vega taking the sun on our new deck)

Though the care our dogs have gotten at the U was usually exemplary, this event prevented us from saying good-bye to Sortia. Reading this letter about the incident brought it back to me in a flash. A wave of sudden sadness and deep grief gripped me for a moment, so strong that I had to put down the file and sit back while I stabilized. This feeling surprised me, came up strong from dead stop.

I also had an unexpected response a few weeks back while watching How To Train Your Dragon II.  In a reunion between the lead character, a young man, and his mother whom he thought dead, a wave of yearning swept through me. I wanted my mother to hug me. She’s been dead 50 years this year and I can not recall a feeling this strong about her in decades.

Here’s what I’m wondering. Do these strong feelings lie waiting for the right triggers, somewhat like PTSD? Or, do they swim around in the neural soup, always this strong, but engaged in another part of our psychic economy? How many of these knots of emotion exist within us, still tied to their original sources, and what significance do they have?

I may not be saying this well. As a general rule, I’m not in the grip of strong emotion unless something political is going on or I haven’t had enough sleep. Politics taps into something primal, as if a god within wakes and demands action. (I use this analogy with some reservation because I don’t believe my politics are divinely inspired, but it gives the right tone to the depth of my political feelings.) Being sleep deprived makes me irritable and far from my best self, so anger comes more easily then.

Now, maybe strong emotion could ride me more often.  Maybe I’m missing out on some part of life that flies those colors with some regularity.  But as a white middle-class guy, educated and with northern european ancestry, friends and spouse of the same, my emotional range is muted and these events, like the ones I describe, are rare.

No conclusion here. Only questions.

 

Family

Enough

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Lughnasa                                                                   Lughnasa Moon

 

 

Business meeting this morning at Key’s Cafe. This move will be and is expensive. Our realtor, Margaret Thorpe, has given us an optimistic view from a net sheet perspective and I certainly hope next February proves her correct. The net for us after a sale will impact the quality and location of home we can afford in Colorado. No surprise there. We’re working hard to get our house in optimal condition so we can make the net as favorable as possible.

Our finances over all have been and are solid. We have dealt with the question of enough and found our answer. It’s what we have available. That makes keeping our budget in line not only manageable, but satisfying.

Enough. Reminds me of Dickens. To paraphrase:  $50,000 in; $49,500 out. Happiness. $50,000 in; $50,500 out. Misery.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Nocturne

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Summer                                                          Most Heat Moon

The increasing pace of the harvest is plant life telling us that the seasons that matter are cropped0017changing. What seems like the height of summer to us presages not more summer, but fall and the big harvests of September and October. That’s what the plants know and in their distinct and ancient language they’re reminding us the time to gather in foodstuffs is now. Right now.

Pressure cookers and canning kettles across the Midwest have begun to heat up, too. That’s another sign. 5 pints of carrots went into the jars today and beets go in tomorrow, green beans as well. In a less complex economy this work would decide whether some of us would live or die through the long winter. Even with our garden I’m grateful for grocery stores. We would have to devote so much more of our time and energy to growing food if it were not for them.

Still, it’s not bad to have a reminder that the complex market system that brings vegetablescroppedIMAG0327 and fruits and meats and processed foods of all kind into our grocery stores is just that, a human system. That means it can be disrupted by war, by natural disaster, by disease, by insects, by normal seasonal fluctuations in temperature and by climate change.

It feels good to have those chicken-leek pies in the freezer. Those red glass jars of pickled beets and the golden ones of carrots. The jarscroppedIMAG0347 of honey and pints of green beans, tomatoes and sauces. Frozen greens and peppers. Dried onions and garlic. Grape jam, currant and gooseberry pies. All the various herbs dried. And last year all the apples and cherries, plums and pears. Next year, probably, too, with the help of bees. (but we won’t be here, most likely, to make that happen.)

Colorado, Family, The Move, Travel

A Busy Time

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Summer                                                                   Most Heat Moon

Ah. A week of guests, Jon and Ruth. 4 days with Kate gone, then 3 more days with a guest. Kate home.

Result? Weariness. A dullness and a minor sense of dispiritedness. An interesting word, this last. The spirit has gone, at least to some extent. The air has gone out of the tire, deflated. The body sags a bit, wanting to settle into a position of rest. There is to each breath the hint of a sigh.

Granting this description a full paragraph makes it sound more than I’m experiencing. It is a minor, will go away feeling. But, it is real. There is, too, a mild exhaustion. Recovery is not quite as quick as it used to be. That’s a third phase reality, too.

And, yes, it was all worth it. Jon and Ruth being here saw the deck get done, our move’s primary purpose strengthened, some important time with Ruth by herself. The time alone meant Kate was riding ahead, hand blocking out the sun, learning the mountains. Mary’s visit reaffirmed family ties, brought knowledge about mom and dad I did not have. So, yes I’m glad all of it happened and will be equally glad to have life take on its new norm as we continue to live in the move.

Today, though. A rest day.