Category Archives: Family

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.

 

 

Aging, Dreams, Family, Third Phase, Writing

Legacy

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Writing.  Learning about the craft 20 years after devoting myself to it.  Yes, I admit it.  Kate was right.  Though I don’t recall, she says she urged me to go to the Loft way back, back in the days after I left the Presbytery.  Now I am.  To learn about publishing and about serious revision.  She’s often more clear about my vocation than I am.  Strange, but true.

The third phase continues to shimmer in front of me, a veiled space not yet known, the part of life that lies on boundary with the undiscovered country which doubles its resonance as if a great bronze tocsin tolls; though still faraway, its sound grows stronger with each passing day.

So. Legacy, then.  What will remain of mine when I cross the veil and enter that other world?  Of course there will be the vague collation of memories in children and grand-children, the sort of hazy recollection that fades with each passing generation.  Of course. There will be, too, the even gauzier remnants of actions taken:  those apartments and houses on the West Bank, a strengthened legislative program at the Sierra Club, work for non-profits and affordable housing through various groups, but in these my print lies barely visible, as it should be, but it means that connection will soon be lost.  If it has not been lost already.

Where I have most hope lies in the words I have written, like my father before me.  No wonder then that as the third phase beckons and the life of the past recedes writing becomes more important.  There is a sense in which legacy is a thing of vanity only and in that regard insignificant, after all most of us travel that last ancientrail unknown soon after we have set out.  There is, though, another sense in which legacy matters because it matters; that is, the legacy continues to entertain, to provoke, to evoke, to engage not in the world of the hereafter but in the world that is here after we are.

It is to this sort of legacy that I aspire and its persistence through time will depend on the quality of the work and thought I bring to it.  I know it seems perverse from some perspectives but I do not care about my legacy while I live.  Fame or money or recognition do not matter.  Only the work.  If any of them would come, I would choose money for the freedom it would give Kate and me to travel.  Recognition matters to me only as affirmation of labor’s worth.  But I value my work myself, so it is not needed.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Family, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

And Jazz Saxophone after it all

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Here we go.  A perfect day.  Revising Missing before 11:00 am.  A sentence from Ovid before lunch.  Nap.  Working with pre-Raphaelites until 4:00.  Some chess until 5.  Workout.  A movie with Kate.  As I said.

Cooking, Family

Putting on the Moves

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Well, got in my hour, actually 2, of chess.  Don’t know whether I want to play actual games. The lessons are brain twisters, requiring spatial thinking and logical thinking combined with strategic planning while executing tactical decisions.  A weird sort of fun.  Similar, in fact, to translating Latin.

(Samuel Reshevsky, age 8, defeating several chess masters at once in France, 1920)

Also translated my sentence in Ovid and got post cards out to the grandkids.  Kate made a great supper with a chipolte butter on chicken breasts, our carrots from last fall and salad.  The carrots have a bright color and a sweet, earthy flavor.

Otherwise trucking along.

Family

This, that

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Imbolc                                                                        Valentine Moon

The snow remains.  16 as I woke up this morning.  There will be no early spring this year.  And I’m grateful for that.  I’m not ready to get out and do serious gardening.  Not yet.  I’ve got books to write.  Latin to translate.  Rooms to clear before I sleep.

A bit of pruning, yeh.  That’s the right stuff for this season.

Went with Kate to her annual physical so we could then go on to Chanhassen and have lunch with Anne, her sister.  She turns 64 this year.

A long day.  Chanhassen lies almost 45 minutes to the south though it’s well within the metro area.  We often drive distances within the metro that would have required real planning when I was a kid.  A difference in perception and habits.

Cinema and Television, Family, Politics, Travel

the quiet american

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

In the spirit of catching up on the films of the last few decades Kate and I watched the Quiet American, a 2002 adaptation of Graham Green’s 1955(!) novel.  It depicts, through the eyes of a British journalist, the early activity of the CIA in creating the South Vietnamese army and government.  Astoundingly prescient.

Raised many different feelings.  Yearning for Southeast Asia, a wonderful, yet strangely far away part of the world.  A place I feel intimately tied to through my sister and brother’s long tenancy there and my 2004 visit.  Disgust at the role of the American government in its most banal anti-communist clothing.  Memories of the 60’s as the dark fruit of the 1950’s seeds began to ripen, then rot.  Kate’s distaste for war.  “Killing doesn’t solve anything.”

A period for my generation that defined us as young adults.  Either for or against, little middle ground.  Those division persist among us.  Even in my high school class there are only a few of us who were anti-war.  The rest, the blue collar middle-class of those days, patriotic in a militaristic, flag-waving way.  Long ago but not far away.

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Third Phase

Wow. You’re Really Old Grandma

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Imbolc                                                               Valentine Moon

Over half done with the move.  I can feel the new shape already fitting round my shoulders as I work.  Volumes ready to hand.  Ideas jumping from one to another with just a scan.  A good feeling.

A bit achy but that seems to come with the 66th birthday.  Talked to grandson Gabe, 4 and  1/2 tonight.  He asked Kate how old she was.  68, she said.  Wow.  That’s really old Grandma.  Oh, yeah.  From the mouth’s of babes.

(Old Man with Beard, Rembrandt)

How old?  So old that we’re going to a meeting tomorrow to talk with a women who is, as her book title says, New at Being Old.  Us, too.  This is a Woolly Mammoth gathering and we’re all of a certain age.  Just which we’re not certain, but a certain age of that we’re sure.

When it comes to life, though, I feel gathered, present, neither old nor young, just here, ready to go, still.  Epictetus had a depressing way to think of it:   “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”  Still, the soul or the self continues to grow and mature as the mansion begins to sag at the corners, a window or two popping out, new paint needed on the doors, tuck pointing here and there.

So, I feel as engaged, if not more, with my life and work as I have ever.

Family, Feelings

All Aboard

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

Of course, it’s just a spot on the earth’s orbit around the sun.  The very spot where you or I slid out of the birth canal, or, in my case, were excised through the abdomen, kicking and bawling, with no clue about why the world had suddenly gone from watery and warm to non-viscous and cool.  No wonder we cry.

(So, there I am, just a bit more than halfway between perihelion and the spring equinox.)

And, it’s an extremely ordinary event.  I mean, everyone who ever lived–everyone–had one.  Certain cultures, I’m told, place no emphasis on the birthday at all and maybe they’re right, but the sentimentality of our way pleases me all the same.

People call us and tell us they love us.  Are happy for us.  Gifts come.  Cards.  Smiles.  A feeling of particularity overshadows all else for at least one day.  Love gets concrete on birthdays.

Advancing age makes me no less interested in celebrating this most ordinary of events which is, of course, supremely extraordinary in one important way:  it’s the only time this happened to me.  Or you.  66 is a good number.  So was 16.  26.  76.  The number says you’re still on board spaceship earth and punching your ticket for another full ride.