Category Archives: Family

Family, Feelings, Friends, Latin, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Getting My Kicks

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Imbolc                                                                             Valentine Moon

Woke up, saw fluffy white snow outlining the trees, shrubs and fences.  A beautiful way to start my 66th year.  Spoke with brother Mark, Mary kept off by technical issues.  A new hard drive.  Always a good way to lose a program or two.  As they say in the Old Testament, blessings and curses.

I’ve been motoring along this morning finishing up a lengthy session in Ovid.  Or, I should say, several one hour or one hour + sessions that equal a lengthy one.  I’ve translated 21 verses and I’m confident of most of what I’ve done.  There are still hitches in my git along, but at least for right now I seem to have a flow underway.

Almost finished with the Eddas.  Then I’m going to put pencil to large format desk pad and start roughing out Loki’s Children.  I want to get it thought through to some extent before I start my revision of Missing.  That way, if I have to change things in Missing (and I think I will) I can do that in the upcoming 3rd revision.  I hope #3 is what will make me ready to start the search for an agent.

As I said the other day, I’m cruising into the third phase of my life, which I count as having started with the arrival of my Medicare card, with clarity of purpose, emotional support from family and friends, and good health.  Here we go.  Charlie, the final chapter.

Aging, Dreams, Family, Garden, Latin, Our Land and Home, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Life Ahead

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Imbolc                                                                Valentine Moon

So.  66.  Tomorrow.  How that long-haired, green book bag carrying, dope smoking political radical could be turning 66 is, I admit, a puzzle.  Yes, he looks a bit different in the mirror.  Well, ok, quite a bit different.  Instead of long hair, little hair.  Instead of the book bag, a kindle.  Not smoking at all.  Hmmm, still a radical though.  Guess the other stuff is detritus of past fashion.

After passing the last great social milestone before the final one, that is, signing up for Medicare, my life has taken on a new cast.  I’ve written about it here, a change that came gradually but with a strange persistence.  That new cast has home, writing, Latin and friends as its core.  It entails reduced traveling into the city, a much lower profile in terms of volunteer work in either politics or the arts.  A word that sums it for me is, quieter.

Quieter does not mean less energetic or engaged, rather it signals a shift in focus toward quieter pursuits:  more reading, more writing, more scholarship, more time with domestic life.  Unlike the pope I do not intend to give up my beloved theological writing. (Kate believes he’s suffering from dementia.)  I intend rather a full-on pursuit of the writing life, novels and short stories, a text on Reimagining Faith.  This full-on pursuit means active and vigorous attention to marketing.

The primary age related driver in this change is greater awareness of a compressed time horizon, not any infirmity.  How many healthy years will I have?  Unknown, though I do actively care for myself.  Still, the years will not be kind, no matter what I do.  So, I had best get my licks in now, while I can still work at my optimum.

So, the man turning 66 has a different life ahead of him than did the man turning 65.   An exciting and challenging life.

 

Family, Our Land and Home

Running the Manor House

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Imbolc                                                                         Valentine Moon

“Bob.  Gas man Bob.”  The sales rep from Centerpoint energy introduced himself, pronounced himself of German ancestry and therefore very excited about strong coffee, minor league baseball and variable speed fan motors.

The second estimate is on the table.  Literally.  At the end of our kitchen table.  Reliance and Center Point.  Nice folders.  Roughly similar costs.  A few bells here, whistles there.

Tomorrow Brad from Air Mechanical comes out.  He’ll be the last.  We’ll make a decision and should have a new furnace by mid-week next week.  At least 95%, maybe 96.5% efficiency if we decide we want the quieter variable speed fan motor.

Owning a home means these kind of transactions go on all year.  The handyman fixes the door.  The snowplower clears the driveway and the sidewalk.  Ray cuts the grass.  Mickman’s opens up our irrigation system and closes it down in the fall.  We have a crew that washes our windows outside twice a year, cleaning the gutters at the same time.  It’s all part of a balance among the things we can do and want to do and what we’re willing to pay others to do.

We do our own pruning, tree removal, garden amending, planting, bee keeping.  I maintain the electric fence and installed it.  We harvest our flowers, vegetables, fruit and honey.  We’re lucky that we can sort tasks out along these lines.  It makes life so much easier.

 

 

Family

Turned the Face Away

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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.

Cooking, Family

Well Meat, Good Sir

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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.

Family, Travel

Global Siblings

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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.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Poetry, Writing

First First

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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

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, General, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

A Productive Day

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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.

Family, Feelings, Friends, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

A Good Week

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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.