• Tag Archives Gabe

  • Vegetables Amidst the Flowers

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    70  bar steady 29.82  6mph SE dew-point 54  Summer, cool and sunny

    Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

    The storm has passed and the air shines, cleared of dust.  Clarity is a July morning after a rain.

    The lilies open more and more with each passing day.  The squash and cucumbers we planted in the perennial beds beside the patio have begun their long and winding way.  Yellow squash blossoms promised fruit to come.

    In several places now we have combined perennial flowers with vegetables.  In one raised bed Asiatic lilies have risen and now bloom amongst heirloom tomato plants with sturdy branches, heirloom beans and a few leaves of lettuce not yet picked.  The beets and the carrots have a Stargazer lily and a daisy in bed with them while the green peppers grow amidst bearded iris, Asiatic lilies and Russian sage.  The garlic grow only with their own kind, likewise the onions though the corn has bush beans in between the rows.

    This mixture appeals to me because it defies expectation.  It is wonderful to see plants with such different missions growing alongside each other.  Is it optimal for either?  Maybe not, but who cares.

    Kate sewed yesterday.  She has made Gabe two small suits, same pattern with different cloth.   He will be quite the little gentleman in them.  She’s happy to be back at the sewing, creating.  It’s important to her sense of self.

    Groceries this AM, then more UU history.  Later on a party at the Stricklands for Kate and Clair.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Friends Garden Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the mark of the covenant between you and me.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar falls 29.22  2mph  SSW dew-point 62  Beltane, cloudy and rainy

                       Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon (English)

    Coming back from a journey throws the traveler back into daily life,  matters that have been suspended on the road.  This trip is no exception.  Stefan’s wife, Lonnie, has surgery today for her adenocarcinoma.  Kate’s got some problems at work.  The tomato plant has not fruited.  E-mail to catch up on.  That pesky novel still calling to me.  That sort of thing.

    Let’s go back to the bris for a minute. 

    Here is the passage from the Torah that provides the theological rationale.  It comes from Genesis 17:

      1         When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said: “I am God the Almighty. Walk in my presence and be blameless.   2  Between you and me I will establish my covenant, and I will multiply you exceedingly.” 3   When Abram prostrated himself, God continued to speak to him: 4  “My covenant with you is this: you are to become the father of a host of nations.  5  2 No longer shall you be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham, for I am making you the father of a host of nations.  6 I will render you exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings shall stem from you. 7 I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.  8 I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land in which you are now staying, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession; and I will be their God.” 9 God also said to Abraham: “On your part, you and your descendants after you must keep my covenant throughout the ages.  10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you that you must keep: every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 Circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the mark of the covenant between you and me. 12 Throughout the ages, every male among you, when he is eight days old, shall be circumcised, including houseborn slaves and those acquired with money from any foreigner who is not of your blood. 13 Yes, both the houseborn slaves and those acquired with money must be circumcised. Thus my covenant shall be in your flesh as an everlasting pact.  14  If a male is uncircumcised, that is, if the flesh of his foreskin has not been cut away, such a one shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

      Verse 10 and 14 have the operative language. (no pun intended)    First, circumcision is a sign of the covenant between Yahweh and the descendants of Abraham and Sara.  Second, Gabe, in order to not be cut off from his people had to have his foreskin circumcised. 

    In the living room of Jon and Jen’s home the mohel, Jay Feder, set his instruments on a wooden table top.  I asked him questions and in the process he and I bonded over our shared knowledge.  Educated in several yeshiva and, for the purpose of the bris, in Jerusalem, Jay, a full time jeweler, is a bright and learned man.  He’s also very funny. 

                                      bris-tripjay046400.jpg

    His shtick included these off hand remarks,  “Oh, I see Adrian (a six month old boy) is here.  I hope he doesn’t remember me!”  When Jon laid Gabe on the pillow (where Jay performs the circumcision), he laid him with his head toward Jay, who said, “So.  Do you like his nose?  You’re ok with it shorter?”  Jon turned Gabe around on the pillow.   He then turned to Jon and said, “All right.  The father performs the bris.  Are you ready?”  And so on.

                                       bris-triptable047400.jpg

    The chair in front of the table with the cloth on it is the Elijah chair.  I asked Jay the significance of the Elijah chair.  He told me the story of Elijah.  You may remember Elijah.  He challenged Ahab and his priest, Obadiah, to a contest of efficacy, their gods, Baal and Ahserah, against his, Yahweh.  Long story short.  Yahweh sends down fire and burns a sacrifical bull, and not only the bull, but the altar as well.  Baal and Asherah did not.  Later on, however, Elijah complains to Yahweh that the people of Israel have not been keeping the covenant.  After this comment, Elijah suffers a demotion and has to anoint his student, Elisha, as his successor.

    Later, Elijah leaves earth for heaven in a whirlwind, on a chariot of fire.  He is the only character in the Tanakh who does not die.  Rabbinic scholars have made much of the study of Elijah and they conclude that Elijah became a perpetual witness to those events in Jewish ritual life that affirm the covenant.  “The rabbis say this may be a reward or it may be a punishment.”  Elijah’s chair, then, gives concrete expression to Elijah’s presence at this most basic of all affirmations of the Abrahamic covenant.

                                   bris-trip055jon-and-gabe400.jpg

    This is Jon (my stepson) and Gabe with his knitted yarmulke.  I wore one, too, but I don’t have a picture.  Asked about the significance of the yarmulke, Jay said, “There are many answers, but one I like is that it shows where we stop and God takes over.”

                                 bris-tripnaming400056.jpg

    After the bris itself, Gabe received his Hebrew name, Gavriel.  This is Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe with Jay giving Gabe several sips of sweet wine.

    Why wine?  Glad you asked, Jay said.  “The body starts deteriorating from the moment of birth until it finally gives up and dies.  It is the reverse in the spiritual life.  As life goes on our spiritual life becomes richer and richer until we make the transition after death.  Wine is one of the things we know that follows the same path.  As it gets older and older, it gets better and better.”

    One of the things I admire and respect about Judaism is its emphasis on home-based worship and ritual.  This event sacralized Jon and Jen’s living room.  While Jay sang some of the blessings, I saw many of Jon and Jen’s neighbors pass by on the street.  It was an interesting blend of cultures.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged

  • Jay, the Mohel

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Quite an afternoon and early evening. 

    At 3:30 Gabe had his first post hospital infusion of factor 8, the clotting factor largely absent from his blood.  We drove a circuitous route through the new homes built on the site of the old Stapleton Airport. 

    We crossed out of that development into a poorer neighborhood, the one in which Jon and Jen both teach.  It is also the location of a former Army base now occupied by the university of Colorado.  It is also the site of  the old Army hospital plus several new buildings that now constitute the University hospital.

    In an old Army hospital building, with a wonderful Art Deco lobby, and old, undecorated halls and rooms is the hemophilia and thrombosis center.  In there the women who staff it made kind noises and praised Gabe’s beauty.

    We went back into a procedure room and there the nurse practitioner found a vein near Gabe’s left ear and slid in a needle attached to a line.  She first drew blood to retest his factor level (occasional misdiagnosis), then inserted the hypodermic containing the factor into the line and pushed it into his bloodstream.

    It works immediately and in fact aids in clotting the puncture created by the needle.

    Gabe whimpered, then went quiet.  In a minute Amy had a gauze patch over the puncture site and held it for about five minutes, just to be sure. 

    2 hours later, at Jon and Jen’s home, Rabbi and Jeweler, Jay performed a wonderful ritual.  Jay and I hit it off.  I held Gabe’s legs while Jay, the mohel, cut the foreskin in two practiced movements.  There’s more to this, but I’m in a  hotel lobby and I feel the need to move on.  Later.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • In Crip’s Territory

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    At Jon and Jen’s.  Held Gabe for an hour.  We had guy to guy chats, his little blue eyes looking up and his mouth forming that curve babies use to indicate they know where communication comes from.  He’s swaddled now and in his downstairs bed.

    A crack of thunder, a lightning flash and rain.  Nice cool down. A fan is on so the room has a nice cross breeze.  Denver is high and the altitude thinner so sunburn and heat pound on bare human flesh.  Likewise, though, in the evening, once the sun goes down, a pleasant coolness settles over the city.  With few bugs summer evenings have a high human pleasure index.

    Jen’s mom, Barb cut her foot on a hotel door.  She went to Urgent Care where they couldn’t stop the bleeding.  Ironic, eh, with little hemophiliac Gabe about to have his bris tomorrow?  So, Jen has left to take Barb to the University ER.  

    We had plans to go to a Brazilian steak house, but we’ve decided on take-out sushi instead.  Jon’s taken off to get the sushi.  He’ll take Jen’s order over to the ER.  So, I’m here with Gabe and Ruth, both asleep.  I’ve got a bit of hummus and some goat cheese as an appetizer.

    The redevelopment of Stapleton Airport, just blocks from Jon and Jen’s house, is a major urban infill project.  Lots of new housing and lots of new upscale shops.  This, too, is ironic since Jon’s neighborhood has the reputation in Denver as the ghetto. It is a mixed income area with the poor and the middle class sharing property lines.  On the whole it seems a pretty calm place, though Jon says it is Crips territory.  He also says the occasional crackhead will break into houses looking for loot.

    Barb’s injury on the eve of Gabe’s bris is family.   The connected web makes her injury now a part of family lore.  Had an odd thought while holding Gabe yesterday.  I am now in the generation that will be remembered, no longer am I part of the generation that remembers.  This underlines the long and ancient trail of generational succession, reaching back to those brave folks who walked out of Africa and stretching forward to where we do not know.   


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • Sayonara, Weber Collection

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79!  bar steep fall  29.62 5mph WSW dewpoint 35  Beltane, sunny

                           Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

    The final Weber tours.  A Japanese language class from Kennedy HS in Bloomington and a small group of stunned ladies of a certain age.  Neither tour was a flop, neither an engaging and vital time.  The Kennedy group had a few kids that were present the whole way, interest.  One young lady took out a notebook and started writing.  The second seemed timid, afraid to respond to inquiry, interested but reticent. 

    At the end a woman told me she’d seen a Bhutan exhibit in Honolulu.  “The objects came with five Buddhist monks.  They came to bless the statues with water each morning.  Since in Buhtan, they received this sprinkling directly, but were in cases like this,”  she indicated the Nara Buddha at the beginning of the show, “they had, oh, I don’t know, a tupperware container,”  she spread her hands out and formed a large sloppy rectangle, “It had water.  Then they had a mirror.  They got the objects reflection in the mirror and sprinkled that.”

    Sayonara, Weber collection and bon voyage.

    I have a long stretch of days with little planned.  No docent classes, no tours, no preaching, no social engagements.  The right time to garden and to write.

    Jon called while I was writing this.  They want to have the bris on June 2nd or 3rd.  Could I come?  I’m there.  I’m excited to see Gabe and Ruth, to see Jon’s garden and Jen with her new brood.

    On to the treadmill.  I try not to remember this, but apparently in Victorian jails, prisoner powered treadmills were a form of human as donkey labor.  I’m not sure but that may be where the term comes from in the first place.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family 📎and tagged

  • A Lot of Growing Around Here

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    52  bar rises 29.78 0mph W dewpoint 34  Beltane

    A very beautiful Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

    More garden work tomorrow.  It feels so good to be back out there.  Kate planted Ireland Creek Annie and Cherokee Trail of Tears and Dragon Tounge beans today.  Also some mixed gourds. 

    A cool evening, a warm day.  Perfect.

    Tomorrow I’ll dig in three tomato plants.  These are plants I’ve grown from seed.  They’re now about a foot high.  It will be nice to see my babies go into the soil.  I’m keeping one back for my kitchen garden which will have tomatoes, lettuce, basil, cilantro, peppers and egg plant.  The latter three I’ll start from seed sometime soon.  Kate’s gonna pick up some seeds at the Green Barn tomorrow.

    Got a nice note from Jon saying they’ve turned Gabe’s lights off and taken him upstairs to his room.  I passed on the e-mails and comment from Tristan’s mom, too.  We’ll gradually weave a web of support around them and the little guy so he can grow up to move on and do what he needs to do in this life.

    A lot of growing be done around here right now.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Garden 📎and tagged

  • There Are Days, Ordinary Days

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    58  bar rises 29.80 2mph W dewpoint 30 Beltane

    New Moon (Hare Moon)

    There are days, ordinary days, days you can recall, when your life took a sharp angle turn, or created a swooping curve, perhaps dipped underground or soared up, up into the sky.

    It seems I remember, though how could I really, the day I got polio.  I don’t know how this memory got shaped or if it got shaped in the way all  memory does, by our selective recollection of snippets of moments, but here it is.

    My mother and I were at the Madison County Fair, held every August on the grounds of Beulah Park.  Mom had wrapped me in a pink blanket and we wandered through the Midway.  There were bright lights strung in parabolic curves and the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs.  I looked out from the blanket, safe on my mother’s shoulder, held in her arms.  And I felt a chill run through me.

    Years later I was with my Dad, early in the morning.  We sat in those plastic cuplike chairs in a pale green room.  My mother came up in an elevator on her way to emergency surgery.  Surgeons would try to relieve pressure on her brain from the hemorrhage she had suffered a week before during a church supper.  I got in the elevator and rode up with her.  Her eyes looked away from me, but saw me anyway.  “Soaohn.” she said.  It was the last time she spoke to me.  I was 17.

    The evening of my first marriage I wandered down a path in Mounds Park where the ceremony had taken place.  I wore a blue ruffled shirt, music of the Rolling Stones carried through the moist July air.  Butterflies landed on my shoulder.

    The night the midnight plane arrived from Calcutta carrying a 4 pound, 4 ounce boy.

    The third week of our honeymoon, a northern journey begun in Rome, found us at our northernmost destination Inverness, Scotland.  We had rooms at the Station Hotel, right next to railroad terminal.  It was a cool foggy night and we took a long walk, following for much it the River Ness, which flows into Loch Ness.  We held hands and looked at this old Scots village, the capital of the Highlands.  A mist rose over a church graveyard on our right.

    And today.  Planting beets and carrots.  Kate taking a phone call.  The news from the lab about Gabe. Now, after this sunny spring day, life will go on, but its trajectory has changed, changed in a profound way, in a way none of us can yet know.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Garden Memories 📎and tagged

  • A Sisyphean Task

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar steady 29.78 0mpn SSW dewpoint 22  Beltane

                            New Moon (Hare Moon)

    The day has passed as we both tried to get our arms around this notion of Gabe as hemophiliac.  As a dedicated user of the internet, I have looked up and printed out several different articles, brochures, information handouts.  Canada Health Services had some good stuff; so did the CDC; and, the World Hemophiliac Federation.  The amount of data, good data, available quickly astounds me every time I reach out for it.  I have not had a disappointing search, ever.

    The emotional problem is this:  lifelong.  This tiny guy, still in the hospital from birth at 35 weeks, now has a mountain to climb every day, every hour for the rest of his life.  This is a Sisyphean task because every time he rolls the ball up the mountain, it will come right back down.  There is no cure.  There is only amelioration.  After looking at the various treatments, I became even more convinced Gabe has the right Dad.  It will require fortitude to climb this mountain,  go to sleep, get up and climb it again.

    So, life will proceed.  We will all come to some terms with this and develop ways we can support Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe.  We all need to learn a lot more right now.

    Daffodils have begun to pop open everywhere, so yellow and white is a dominant accent to green here now.  Tulips should come into bloom any day now and the magnolia is out in all its snowy fineness.  Working in the garden, even for a bit, literally grounds me, draws anxiety out and replaces it with the strength of life’s eternal cycle.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged

  • Hey, Buddy, Got Any Pictures?

    Posted on by Charles 2 Comments

    55  bar falls 29.59 8mph NE  dewpoint 36 Beltane

                     Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

               grandmaanddescendants.jpg

    This is Grandma and her descendants, Gabriel and Ruth.  Gabe still has to learn to suck and swallow.  He also needs to wean himself from the canula that deliver an oxygen stream.  Both of these are maturational tasks that would have completed on their own in the womb, so he just needs to grow and get older.  Right now everyone wishes he’d do both quicker, unmasking one of the many contradictions in human development.  As we age, no one wants to get older and grow bigger. 

    Kate came home last night.  She was sad.  Ruthie now knows her and runs up with a smile and arms out, “Grandma!”  That’s tough to leave.  Gabe, too, is in a vulnerable place even though she’s confident he’ll be fine.  She also helped out Jon and Jen with domestic matters like cooking, grocery shopping and Ruth care when Ruth was not in daycare. 

    Having a child in the hospital creates stress just because, but there is stress, too, because work goes on while the daily routine gets disrupted.  No one gets enough sleep.  A tough time for the Olson family, Denver branch.  It will receded into the past, someday, and become the stuff of family legend.  When you were a baby, Gabe, you were in the hospital so long and we were so worried.

    A reader from the Webiverse asked to see some photographs of my hydroponic setup.  It occurred to me that it might be the feds trying to catch a not too intelligent dope grower.  Go, ahead, buddy, show me your pictures.  Heh, heh, heh.  I hope so, but because boy are they going to be disappointed.

                               hydro2300.jpg

    From this and the next angle all you can see are lettuce and tomato plants, but there are also morning glories, cucumbers and three varieties of beets.  These last are not as far along in the growth process and will go outside as soon as the weather warms up.

                               hydro300.jpg

    As I’ve begun to work with the hydroponics, this setup seems small.  The megafarm is the larger of the two; the smaller is sold as Emily’s farm.  

                              Here’s the whole deal, including the seed sprouting area. The halide bulb and shield are just out of sight near the top.

                              hydrosetup300.jpg

    It’s amazing the charge I got out of working with seeds and young plants when snow and cold weather blew around the house.  I plan to branch out (ha,ha) a bit over the year to include flowers and, maybe, carnivorous plants.  No, I don’t know why.

                             


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Hazards in the Learning Process

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    41  bar steady  29.96  0mph ESE dewpoint 24  Spring

                        Last Quarter Moon of Growing

    Spent a good part of the afternoon on mechanical and electronic stuff.  It was time for the first changing out of the nutrient reservoirs in the hydroponics. 

    I first tried the way the setup suggested, that is, drain the reservoirs onto the plastic shelf on which they both sit.  This is not as crazy as it may sound since the shelf has grooves pressed in to carry used nutrient mix and water toward a drain plug at the end of the shelf.  So, I hooked up some plastic tubing by cutting a small hole in the end of the cap and opened the taps.  This is slow.  The drain hose is not too big.  It’s also messy since the hole in end of the plug allowed a bit of the liquid to drain around the tubing and drip on the lights (electric!) and the floor. 

    Hmmm.  Had to be a better way.  Then I thought of all those car thieves hard at work stealing gas.  Siphon!  By chance I had one hundred feet of plastic tubing and it fit inside the drain tubing quite neatly.  I pushed this tube through the hole in the drain cap, sucked on it a bit and voila!  Both of them drained all by themselves.  Still took a while, but it is a handsoff operation.

    As I read somewhere, I took the used nutrient mix out and poured on the garlic, garlic is a heavy feeder and impervious to the cold weather we’ve had.  That’s important because you can’t encourage growth in most plants when the temperature can still go below freezing.  That possibility exists here until May 15th.  I also poured it on some daffodils about to bloom.

    Then I made 9 gallons of fresh nutrient mix and poured it back into the reservoirs through the pots holding the lettuce, tomato plants, three kinds of beet and morning glories.  A tip I read in the hydroponic bible (according to the folks at Interior Gardens) suggested swapping out the nutrient every three rather than four.  So, I did.  This is fun.

    The treadmill still has some hiccups.  I had to rewire it again this afternoon.  Landice apparently thinks they may have sent me a bad rheostat.  If so, that means I swapped a bad one for a bad one rather than a good one for a good one.  More work ahead there.

    I also put away all the material from the Weber tours and the bronze tour I have a month or so ago.  The library is neat. (in a manner of speaking.  That is, my manner.)  I have a file to read for the three hour bronze session I have for Family Day on the 11th.  I also have a number of articles and objects to use as reference while I write something about Urania visiting the MIA.

    Kate called today, too.  Ruthie ran out of the kitchen yesterday, into the dining room and tripped, falling on the corner of the coffee table.  Big cut.  Lots of angst.  But super grandma was there to be calm.  She and Jon took Ruthie to urgent care for stitches.  This is a busman’s holiday for urgent care doc, Kate Olson, but it gave her a feel for the other side of the examining table.  As she often does, she felt guilty.  Not her fault.  Ruth is a puppy, running and playing and trying out the world.  There are hazards in that learning process and none of us escape.

    She comes home tomorrow and I’m glad.  The bris has been delayed because Gabriel still has not decided to eat enough and he’s still on some oxygen.  Until he can eat and breathe on his own, he’ll remain in the level 2 nursery.

    And.  No snow!


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden GeekWorld Great Work 📎and tagged