Imbolc Cold Moon
For Kate, an early valentine:
Category Archives: Family
Turned the Face Away
Winter Cold Moon
Business meeting this am. Then more picture organizing. Out to lunch at Osaka’s for the sashimi appetizer. Over to Home Depot for a tour of the warehouse of the American Dream.
Sunday is a slow day. When Kate and I went to Osaka on this Super Bowl Sunday every one of the booths had women occupying them. I was the only y chromosome among the customers.
In the last year I’ve given up football, cable tv and carbs. I say given up, but really what I’ve done is turned my face away from them. I don’t feel a sense of denial in any of the three. Strange, they all occupied such a substantial part of my pre-65 life. And now they don’t.
Well Meat, Good Sir
Winter Cold Moon
Back from the Butcher and Boar. Quite the testosterone joint for a place with no televisions tuned to the game. In fact, no televisions. This place is about meat. Fish, fowl and game. I had wild boar sausage, a side of fried green tomatoes and spicy greens. Kate and I shared a sampler of their pickled meats.
To my surprise I liked the Braunschweiger. It came in a small glass terrine, a paste, and made me think I’d never had good Braunschweiger before.
The place, though, was noisy. In extremis. Even for those without impaired hearing it would have been difficult to hold a normal conversation.
The interior is dark wood, lots of mirrors, granite topped tables and sturdy forks, spoons and especially the knives.
The bar, a long one, had almost 100% business type guys sitting ordering from the gray haired bar tender who moved methodically and quietly from patron to patron. The wait staff is young, good looking men and women in black Butcher and Boar t-shirts.
We decided in the end that it was a nice place to visit, once. Probably not a return place for us older generation carnivores.
Global Siblings
Winter Cold Moon
Brother Mark went on a tour of Saudi Arabia over break. He saw a bit of Medina from a bus, haram to kafirs, and much of a part of Saudi Arabia where the Nabataeans lived. The Nabataeans built Petra, the great rock city, now in Jordan.
(a view in Jordanian Petra)
It widens the personal when siblings live such far ranged lives as Mark’s in Riyadh and Mary’s in Singapore. It means events in certain corners of the world, say Syria or Lebanon, have immediate interest for me aside from their geopolitical consequences. Singapore shows up in the news a lot, too, most recently as an unhappy place.
Skype means we can see each other regularly and speak to each other at the same moment, if not the same time. Video phones! The future! Their lives have differences from mine that I cannot imagine, most prominently work environments where the expectations of other cultures are not only evident, but in charge.
Personal life, too, is much different, of course. Take Mary’s story on the flowering palm at the Singapore Botanical Garden. Or her dancing in street festivals with colleagues. Or our visiting the fire-walking at a Hindu temple when I visited her. Mark works as a Caucasian minority in a nation virtually closed to tourists, but thronging with foreign workers, among them his fellow teachers at Riyadh University.
He told a story in a recent e-mail: “I got let out at these nice ruins by this older guy who let me in. He had driven me out to the ruins, they were a ways out from the gate. I was dumped out by him. I had a fairly good time inspecting these really cool ruins. Then, the same guy comes up with two cops in a jeep. One Arab interprets, I am free to go. I walked to another site, then walked out, as I agreed. I was walking out when the same old guy who let me in appears with some other dude, probably a cop. He was in plain clothes. I have tea and coffee with the cops. Then, the plain-clothes cop gives me a lift to a hotel. Closely following were the same two cops from the ruins in a police jeep.”
Not to mention of course that we have snow and zero temps. Mark’s in the desert and Mary’s in the tropics.
First First
Winter Cold Moon
Kate premiered as both lyricist/poet and sung song writer. She wrote the following to the words of the passover song, Dayenu. We sang it today during the service at Groveland.
Refrain: Di-di-urnal di-di-urnal
di-di-urnal, di-di-urnal, di-urnal, di-urnal:[[ di-urnal, time has come
Circles come and circles go round
Life eternal, everlasting
Everlasting, life eternal
Diurnal (refrain)
Season come and seasons go round
Spring and summer, fall and winter
Winter, autumn, summer and spring.
Diurnal
Spring has come and life awakens
Time to get the garden ready
The ground is turned, seeds are planted
Diurnal
Summer comes and brings warm weather
Flowers bloom and insects hover
The crops grow big and bear their fruit.
Diurnal
Autumn comes and brings the ripening
Apples are crisp, berries are sweet
Harvest starts with food preserving.
Diurnal
Winter comes, the earth goes to sleep
Time for reflecting, memories sweet
The cycle ends, new one begins.
Diurnal
Circles come and circles go round
Life eternal, everlasting
Everlasting, life eternal
Diurnal
A Productive Day
Winter Cold Moon
Kate spent the day at a sewing retreat. All day. From 9 am to 9 pm. She came home exhausted, achy and smiling. “I got a lot of work done.” That’s Kate for I had a really good day.
Meanwhile I worked upstairs reading the Eddas and editing my presentation for Groveland tomorrow. The dogs tend to get a bit rowdy if one of us isn’t upstairs with them. With Kate gone, that needed to be me.
We did our dance together, the dogs and me’ I napped and worked out. Watched a TV series on Netflix. A laid back but productive day for me, too.
I have posted a link to Living in Season here. It’s yet another segment in my continuing work on reimagining faith. This one focuses on developing a pagan liturgical year.
A Good Week
Winter Cold Moon
This has been a good week. Woollies Monday night at Mark’s. Good food, intimate 
conversation with friends of many years. A solid base to life outside the home.
Tuesday night Kate and I went to see the Hobbit. Ate dinner at Tanner’s afterward. Going out together is part of the glue that holds our relationship together. The movie itself reinforced my writing, excited me. The movie together puts another memory in the common memory bank. Like South America, the Aegean, Europe, Hawaii, Mexico, Denver. All part of our mutuality.
Yesterday dinner with Bill Schmidt, then Sheepshead with Roy, Ed, Bill and Dick. Another base outside the home.
Then breakfast this morning with Mark Odegard. He’s reading Missing and offered some very helpful insights. We talked about life, art, how do we work in this third phase of our lives?
Weave into those social events a few Latin sentences translated, more of the Edda’s read, a bit of thinking about how to continue my love affair with art and the art world. Steady exercise and a sensible diet. The dip that showed up early has begun to disappear.
For Kate
Winter Cold Moon
Would never have thought to say it this way, but it’s true. 
when I met you,
flowers started growing
in the darkest parts of my mind
Grandpop’s Story Time
Winter Cold Moon
At lunch on Friday Allison reminded me of a long ago passion: theatre. I got started with the role of the Stage Manager in Our Town, a high school production. After that I acted and danced (yes, really!) through college and seminary. I’ve not done anything with it since then because theatre work demands so much time.
But. Allison suggested spoken word performance. I’d not thought of it in years. Still, as the idea turned over and over, I hit on something I would enjoy. And here’s the first one.
Good Morning. Good Afternoon. Good Night.
Winter New (Cold) Moon
When Mark and Mary and I spoke today, it went like this: “Good morning, Charlie.”
“Good afternoon, Mark.” “Good night, Mary.” 8 am here. 5 pm Riyadh. 10 pm Singapore.
Another interesting aspect here. Solar weather can upset internet connections over global spans. Felt like we may have had some today. Mark’s connection seems to be the weakest of the three. Whether that’s Saudi tech or Mark tech or, in this case, the sun itself, hard to say.
Woolly brother Bill Schmidt down with a bad cold as the 2013 flu season begins to reach saturations last seen during the pandemic. The older we get and the frailer we get, the more problematic the flu can become, a fact strongly underlined by the death of two healthy teenagers in Minnesota this season.
The flu shot, they say, is 60% effective. Good, but far from perfect. That leaves 40 out of a 100 still exposed. A large number. But, better than 100%.
4 more tours with Qin Shi Huang Di, then blank mornings on the calendar.