Category Archives: Family

Family

Better Now

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Spring                                                                 Planting Moon

The healing power of love.

Up this morning, working on cleaning chores, feeling raggedy and run down.  The snow and the cold have become the house guest who does not know when to leave.  Granted the three day rule is too short for seasons, but we know when the time to go has come.  And it has.  Two weeks plus past, I think.

Feeling slow, then Kate called.  She talked about Gabe who taught her how to find Thomas on Youtube on her I-Pad.  And 7 year old Ruth whose favorite color is now blue, no longer purple because purple is too young.  “How much is 10 divided by 100, Grandma?” Ruth asked.  “I don’t know.”  Ruth, “0.10.”  Oh, my.  She cooks, sews, does gymnastics, reads with inflection.  That’s Ruth, not Grandma.  Grandma does not do gymnastics.

Anyhow after talking to Kate my feelings pushed back up to energized.  Amazing what the human voice and a long term relationship can achieve in just a moment.  Thanks, sweetie.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Family

Road Trip Grandma

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Spring                                                                     Planting Moon

MNDOT says the roads between here and Iowa are in good condition.  Much better than this morning.  Gertie and Rigel watched, worried as we packed Kate’s rental Nissan.  She got off after lunch out and a nap.

No Quilt Museum this phase of the trip, she’ll drive into Iowa tonight as far as she can, then another day and another day and probably another day.  She may arrive earlier than she planned, but better before the birthday party than after.  Much better.

On the home front I’m headed over to Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove tonight to see a cinema version of a Manet exhibition. I have no idea whether this will be any good. Here’s the details from the e-mail:

Exhibition: Great Art on Screen – series begins this Thursday, April 11

Exhibition is a new series capturing the world’s greatest art exhibitions and screening at a cinema near you.

First in the series, Manet: Portraying Life takes viewers on a 90-minute virtual private tour of the career-encompassing collection of the works of Edouard Manet, currently on exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts with screenings from April 11. Two additional Exhibition events will follow including Munch with screenings from June 27 — a “once-in-a-lifetime” exhibition of the greatest number of Edvard Munch’s works ever, co-hosted by the National Museum and the Munch Museum in Oslo — and Vermeer with screenings from October 10 from the National Gallery, London where audiences will be given a unique perspective on the masterpieces of Johannes Vermeer. Go beyond the gallery to see exclusive behind-the-scenes footage on how an exhibition is created for public view. Hosted by art historian Tim Marlow, featuring special guests.

Family, Travel

Oh, Grandma.

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Spring                                                                 New (Planting) Moon

Guess what follows Kate’s path of travel to Denver exactly?  In the top image you can see US 35 which heads south into Iowa.  That’s Kate’s trajectory.  After Minnesota, into Iowa and Nebraska, perhaps not so bad.  But getting there today?  Could be very difficult.

 

 

Family, Third Phase

Going Out on the Town With My Sweetie

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Spring                                                                        Bloodroot Moon

Kate and I went to the Macy’s Flower Show.  The Dayton’s flower show.  Anyhow, I’d never been but going once came because we’ve agreed that each of us has one time during the month that we can schedule whatever we want.  And the other one has to go along.

Last month we went to the Loring Pasta Bar to listen to Hot Club of France type jazz (Kate’s choice) and to the Cynthia Hopkin’s performance, This Clement World at the Walker.  In a rut already I’ve chosen another Walker performance, a jazz pianist and his ensemble late in the month.

Kate felt we weren’t doing enough together, too much like adults engaged in parallel play.  She quilts; I write.  She was right.  It was a habit and we broke it.  I’m glad we did.

The best part of today’s outing was the Smack Shack.  A food truck that turned in its wheels for brick and mortar the Smack Shack serves po’ boys and lobster boils.  We had the lobster boil complete with the bib, shell crackers and tiny forks.  I haven’t eaten lobster in a very long time and it was fun.

Turned out it was the Twin’s first day-time game this year, so I had to park about 6 blocks, long blocks, away–it’s on 6th and Washington North.  That turned out to be a treat because I could take a survey of this rapidly changing part of the city.  Lofts, luxury apartments, redone warehouses, new apartment buildings, lots of restaurants, design stores, gutted buildings and construction zones.  A fun, energized area, an area that used to be fairly dull commercial.  Not too long ago.

Family

Singapore. Saudi Arabia. U.S.A.

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Spring                                                                        Bloodroot Moon

Singapore-Riyadh-Andover.  Skype keeps the family together, once atomized, now a small molecule bonded by the internet.  Today and yesterday are Riyadh based brother Mark’s weekend and it’s Good Friday so Singapore civil servants, including my sister Mary, have the day off.  As most family conversations go, we wanted to know about cousins and Mark’s medical procedure, Mary’s featured role in an Indonesian international education conference and her trip on to Valencia for another conference.  My recent trip to Washington, D.C.

This all has a 1950’s video telephone feel to me.  Formica table tops and background posters for fall-out shelters would fit.  Yet we are in the third millennium after the birth of Jesus.  A lot of  the 1950’s wildest ideas blossoming all around us and a whole raft of unanticipated ones, too.

I especially like the tricycle in the background and the thoughtful, well-dressed housewife showing how easy it is to get below ground when the atomic weapons start dropping.  Makes me feel safer.

 

Dogs, Family, GeekWorld, Third Phase, Travel

I Knew Her Right Away

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Spring                                                                              Bloodroot Moon

Home again, home again.  The dogs greeted me with unusual joy and vigor.  Vega spun round and Gertie jumped up, biting at me to come play.  Tumultuous.  And wonderful.

Kate came into the Loon Cafe and picked me up from the Hiawatha light rail.  She had on blinking ear-rings.  The server at the cafe, before I arrived, had asked her, “Is that how your friend will recognize you?”  It was.  I knew her right away.

She led us through the maze of parking spaces to the truck, not easy in the mammoth commuter ramps that collect cars from the western burbs.

The trip home had no remarkable moments, a good thing for travel.  I did use, for the first time, a bar code boarding pass on my cell phone.  Felt very with it.  You all have probably done it for years, but it was amazing to me.

It’s nice to use the full size key-board and not the 92%, slick metal keys of the netbook.  Having said that, the netbook has been the best single computer purchase I’ve ever made.  It goes everywhere with me when I travel.  It’s compact, picks up wi-fi with ease and has a 92% keyboard, which is why I bought it.  It’s allowed me to post on this blog from as far away as Cape Horn, south of Tierra del Fuego.

 

Art and Culture, Dreams, Family, Travel

Oh, man.

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Imbolc                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

Oh, man.  Staying up late no longer has the romance it used to have, or else the way I feel after, like this morning, has simply become intolerable.  Whatever I don’t like the feeling, jangly, edgy, a bit morose.

Had a dream last night where someone tried to steal my laptop.  While I had it in my hands.  I cried out, “Stop that!” and flung my arms up, waking myself up.  Pre-travel jitters I imagine.

Now when I travel, or at least prior to travel, I have a period, sometimes intense, of not wanting to go.  Not wanting to leave the predictable comforts of home for the uncertainty of the road, the hassles, the physical demands.  Once I leave the house this all wanes and then again I delight in travel.  The strangeness of it.  The oddities.  Even the hassles, so long as they don’t involve running for airplanes.

My family was born to travel.  Mom went to Europe as a WAC during WWII.  Dad traveled happily and often within the US with the occasional trip to Canada.  Once, even, to Singapore.  Mark has traveled the world since college or close thereafter.  Mary moved to Malaysia many years ago and both still wander.  Mary just returned to Singapore from Valencia and England.  Mark toured Saudi Arabia over his break.

Wanderlust, I suppose.  A sense that the present moment, the home, needs the occasional view from afar.  A desire to see what’s over the next hill.  In the next valley.  Around the next bend.  There is, too, at least for me, gaining a clear sense of my Self as stranger in this world, one alone while living with others.  This existential isolation hides often at home, the quotidian a salve for it.

So, Washington, D.C.  I was last there during a layover for a train home from Savannah, Georgia.  I went to the National Gallery that day; I’ll go again this week.

Art and Culture, Family

Marriage is jazz.

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Imbolc                                                             New (Bloodroot) Moon

Jazz at Tryg’s.  Wenso Ashby.   His trio was perfect for a celebration of our anniversary.  Marriage is jazz.  So much improvisation on old standards with the occasional solo performance that comes back, blends in, continues the melody.

This was a benefit for KBEM, the local jazz station that has hit the big time since its inception as an internet radio station.  Kevin Barnes, a KBEM DJ, made the interesting point that being a jazz station was incidental to the stations primary purpose, training young people in the various skills necessary for careers in radio and media.

In fact, this event was a fund raiser for the intern program.  Lucky for us that this educational organization happens to sponsor a damned good jazz station.

Art and Culture, Family, Latin

Tired Mind

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Imbolc                                                                Valentine Moon

Must of worn out this mind.  Talking to Mark early.  8 a.m.  Then some time on revision, how to do it with a book I’d forgotten, but has very wise advice.  Finding Your Writer’s Voice.  After that, a careful read through an essay on PRB technique and method, one that involved a lot of looking up terms, finding examples of certain techniques in paintings available on the internet.  (all of them, so far)  Then writing the post below.

After that I started to review my Latin for tomorrow.  Couldn’t make my mind go there.  Then I sent went over to Chess.com for some lessons.  I performed abysmally, lowering my rating on challenge after challenge.  I hate feeling stupid and those two did it for me.

Glad Kate and I have dinner out and a piece of performance art at the Walker, Cynthia Hopkin’s piece, This Clement World.  It’s time to unload the brain cells.

Family, Travel

Saudi Arabia

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Imbolc                                                       Valentine Moon

Saudi Arabia.  Mark has been there for well over a year, almost 2, so the day-to-day scene comes more and more into focus, even for me, 8,000 miles away.  Perhaps the oddest piece of information so far concerns postal service.  Addresses don’t work in Saudi Arabia.  To this northern European mind, used to numbered homes and buildings, named streets and precisely divided zip codes this data fails to process.  So much so that we insisted (I insisted) on sending Mark a package for Christmas to his school.  Well, it hasn’t arrived quite yet.

Apparently the only solution to this problem is to use Fedex or DHS.  Which begs the question of how they find a place, but they must have some kind of system.  So, next time we send Mark a picture of Gertie and a book on the geo-political affairs of Saudi Arabia, it’ll go out Fedex.

Banking, too, has its peculiarities.  You can’t get a bank account without an iqama, sort of a work visa, and Mark’s school has not been able to arrange iqamas for their first year employees.  This is Mark’s first year working in Riyadh.  An iqama is roughly equivalent to a green card in the U.S.  Without it Mark has to go on a familiar routine for expats in many countries, a visa run.  On a visa run you leave the country where you live, stay away a few days, then re-enter, starting the visa process again, usually for a period of 90 or 180 days.

Mark also reports that a few students watch jihadi videos and execution videos in his class. His afternoon classes have to stop for the afternoon prayer, then start up again.  The priorities of other cultures, which seem obvious to them, often seem odd or at least unexpected to outsiders.  Mark seems to have adjusted very well to the differences between his U.S. acculturation and the Saudi’s.