Because it’s Midnight

Posted on August 24, 2008 by K

I hate to go to bed. You go to bed and you have to face finding that door into sleep, and that’s a hard journey sometimes these days. So I tend to hang with Chaz, messing around, putting it off when I know I’m probably just making myself over-tired, which, as I learned trying to get four babies to sleep through the night, is not the best strategy.  And then there are always the things that go bump in the night.

But we had stumbled on this TV biography of Judy Garland, who I have not much liked over the years, and it turned out to be way more interesting that I would’ve thought. It was eleven thirty at night, and we were just about to jump ship, when there was this noise. Not like anything I’ve ever heard in my life.

First, a gigantic impact, then this tremendous machine sound of screeching and straining metal. Computers flew everywhere. I lunged for the front door, jamming shoes on my feet, and flew out into the now silent dark, bellowing, “What’s going on out here?” (That’s just my cautious little way.)

I flew out the front gate, ran into the street where we had three cars parked on the curb: Chaz’s brand new ancient red Saturn, the replacement for the car that was destroyed when she was T-boned a couple of months ago, M’s beloved green Saturn (ours for over a decade), and Guy’s fishing truck.

Chaz came pounding down the drive after me, and we both slid to a halt in the middle of the street. There was a car embedded in the front of M’s car – which was not so much at the curb now as all over the sidewalk.

Blue Car Crash

The door of the other car was open, and a kid in a dark Tshirt was walking heavily toward me saying, “I was asleep, ma’am. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I was sleeping.”

And I heard myself yelling at him, “What the devil were you doing driving if you were that tired?”

Blue Car Crash

I realize now that I was keeping my distance from the whole thing. When I looked at M’s car, knowing that it was probably totaled, it was like some last bit of M had been taken away from me.

Blue Car Crash

I sent Chaz for my phone, had her call 911. The rest was all, as is not unusual in these cases, kind of a nightmare. It was so dark, we could hardly see anything. Somehow, I had a heavy flashlight in my hand. My across the street neighbor, Nancy, had hot-footed it down the street and was sitting on the sidewalk with the kid, wondering if he was hurt. He hadn’t looked hurt – but sure enough, there was a head shaped dome of shattered glass in the windshield just above his steering wheel.

Blue Car Crash

I was talking to dispatch. All of a sudden, there were all these people around the cars, these skinny boys in long T-shirts. They were opening the doors – and I said into the phone, “They’re getting the stuff out before it’s towed.” Dispatch yelled into my ear – “Don’t let them touch anything. Get them away from the car.” So the knee jerk school marm voice whipped out. “The police say get away from the car. Get out of there NOW.”

I had no idea who these kids were. Why they were there. And that’s, I think, when the shock began to clear. The kid had come right up to me with his insurance info. Chaz went in to photo copy. Six police cars were now in the street, lights flashing, and my neighbor, Reed, pulled me aside and said, “He wasn’t sleeping, like he said.”

Blue Car Crash

I asked him to warn the police that there might be more going on here. But they already knew it.  The T-shirts were now all half a block down, sitting in the front yard of another neighbor’s house.

The police started going through the car carefully, and after a while, had a nice big pile of things on top of the car.  They had asked us to keep clear.  They were really nice about it, but we were not supposed to get in the way.  A conclave of neighbors now stood on the sidewalk with us.  I say neighbors.  I mean friends.

They finally took the kid who hit our car off in cuffs—he was wanted for other things. After a while, a cop put on his night vision gear, wanting to get the license of the car down where the kids in the T-shirts were sitting. Immediately, they leapt up, jumped into their car and took off out of the neighborhood.  The cop jumped in his car too and accelerated very smoothly and quickly, chasing them.

Two kids live down at that house.  It used to be a family, but that had splintered and the kids had been left to live with their grandfather, a very nice man whose health has not been kind to him.  At this point, with six black and whites still lit up in the street, there were two kids down in front of that house, skateboarding in the dark.  “Flipping us off,” on of the cops said cheerfully, “without actually doing it.”

The tow truck came.  He negotiated the chessboard of police cars, and we scooted out of his way.

They had found something else.  Something incriminating belonging to one of the kids down the street – later, it was said to be a wallet with illegal substance in it.  A police car slid down that way, and they took another kid off in cuffs.  This one belonged to the house, a kid I had really loved when he was little, an angel, sweetest boy ever.

The police couldn’t have been more pleasant. They didn’t even arrest me for talking too much, which I tend to do when I’ve been shocked. Chaz does it too. And the American Family insurance people I called about their client’s little outing were very helpful.

It was a lovely night really. Just cool enough. The neighbors out there all telling stories and, once we knew nobody was hurt, laughing together. The humor gets just a little dark at times like these. But it was companionable. Michelle and I talked about it today, how nice it had been to stand out in the street at midnight with all these guys, talking, how we’d like to do it more often – but under other circumstances.

The ruins of M’s car, we pushed off the sidewalk.

We lingered for a while after the last policeman had gone, just keeping watch, maybe. A little too strung up to go in, maybe. Now I’ve got a new problem to deal with in the daylight, in a heap out there by the curb.

And I’m really, really sad.


Blue Car Crash

Posted in Just life | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

And in Other News . . .

Posted on August 22, 2008 by K

           I kind of want to get into some of the more serious current issues.  Because I am a serious person.  Yesterday, I even left a patronizingly sarcastic comment on a comment somebody had left on a review somebody had written on a book I looked up at Amazon because I’d heard about it on PBS.

            See?  Serious.

            I was thinking about these things last night as I was winding myself up in my sheets, and thought – you know, serious discussion is what blogging’s all about.  So here goes:

 

Aging:      I’m against it.

 

Politics:    Usually involve people who want power.  Wanting power is pretty much an indication that you shouldn’t have it.  I still say we need to find that guy from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and make him do it.  Whatever the election is about, he’s the guy.

 

Sleeping:   Not so much against it as  incapable of it.  Yeah, yeah – I’ve tried vitamins and drinking enough   water and exercising before bed and not exercising before bed and zen and imagining a white horse running and counting cricket chirps and even watching political commentary.  I personally think that sometimes they just leave out the “off” switch in some people.  And no, I am not ADD.  Excuse me, there’s something I’ve got to run and go do.

Being Green:  My back yard.  Lovely.  Except you have to mow it.  I wonder if that counts as conditional love?

Back yard fun.  Other pictures at the end.

 

The Olympics: I’m pretty much “for” on this because, even though we hardly ever watch TV, we like watching these, which keeps all of us in the same room.  Well, unless you count what’s inside of laptop computer screens as a “room.”  But at least we’re all in one room while we’re in other rooms.  That’s an improvement.

            However, I am going to list all of the events in which I do not ever, under any circumstances, wish to participate:

1.      The pommel horse.  In my experience, usually horses only have one pommel, and that only if they are wearing a saddle.  It’s what the horn sticks out of.  Good for keeping you from sliding down the horse’s neck when he wants to grab a bite on trail, which he is not supposed to do in bit.

These gymnastics “horses” actually have two pommels, though they wouldn’t do you any good on a saddle, the way the things are designed.  I have a vague memory of abject humiliation and shame connected with trying to “leap” up on a pommel horse in gym class once.  In New York, I think it was, where I was already the skinny, weakling little white twirp.  So this event does not interest me, even though that one American guy did a fairly amazing and credible imitation  of fireworks on the horse, which I very much appreciated WATCHING.

 

2.     Did I ever mention how much I hate Microsoft Word and it’s very helpful automatic formatting?

 

3.     I don’t want to get anywhere near anything that has anything whatsoever to do with bars of any kind.  Not the least because you’ll usually have to “leap” onto it.  But also because you have to balance.  I have good balance.  Really, I do.  I can sit a horse who is in the process of jumping sideways fifteen feet because he’s seen a basketball standard knocked over up in the mountains where – well, we still can’t figure out why that basketball thing was up there in the first place.  It’s always easier to sit a jump like that when you see it coming, but hey – I stuck it.

I am pretty much sure, though, that even if I could pull off a double back twist whatever dismount off of something, I would not stick it.  And that cute little three sixty turn they make on one foot on the balance beam (beams, bars, whatever)?  Yeah.  Well.

I once saw film of on Olympic hopeful training on the uneven parallel bars (does that bother people with OCD?).  The kid missed a grip, flew off backwards and when she hit the ground, the top of her head was facing the same direction as her feet.  I mean, she was folded over on herself.  My neck would have snapped.  Seriously, they would have had to bag up my head and tape it to the rest of me for pick-up. 

Not doin’ that.  Ever.

 

4.     High dive? Not doin’ that.  Low dive?  Who are they trying to kid?  Even when I was a tiny thirteen year old Chinese girl I couldn’t have done it.

 

5.  This may surprise you, but I’m not doin’ the equestrian stuff either.  Jumping.  My little horse loves to jump, but we usually stay away from people’s fences and ponds and anything else that may be built more than a foot off the ground or a couple of feet wide, and certainly stay away from anything that could collapse and trip the horse then have him do a flip and land on top of me.  I’m trying not to be reactionary, here.  But I’ve been stepped on by ONE FOOT of a horse, and I’m telling you, that’s more than enough. Though, now I think of it, maybe that horse flip thing would work as a new international event.

 

6.      Dressage looks cool.  You get to wear those hot hunting jackets, and it doesn’t look like you can get damaged too badly.  But you do have to hold very still and make only meaningful gestures.  Nice if I could do either of those things, but pretty darn unlikely.

 

7.     Running—uh-huh.  They even let you do it in gold hoop earrings.  Still, you’d have to move fast for at least 100 meters or whatever.  I can do that if a baby is falling over the railing of the second story deck across the street, and even get there in time to catch the baby.  But do it for a gold medal (especially one that looks plastic – GO CHINA)?  Naw.  I don’t think so. 

 

8.     Beach volley ball?  As much as I respect the sport, the uniforms wouldn’t suit me.  Motocross?  Don’t you hate what those helmets can do to your hair?  Did they do ping pong this time?  Maybe they carried that particular even on OXG.  Or maybe the cartoon network.

 

9.       The only thing I would ever even consider doing, because I really, really love watching it, is curling.  I love curling.  It’s ADD (which I am not  – honest) in slow motion.  Very calming, almost lyrical, and a very good use for brooms.  Maybe the only good use for them.

 

10.    End of Olympics part.

 

 Other hot button issues:

 

Women’s rights:   I leave that to the leftists.

 

Eggs:  Cooking some now.  Finally.  Call it “brenner.”  (Get it?  Breakfast AND dinner? Bre-nner?  Yuk yuk. Yesterday, I didn’t even get to the shower and dressing part of the day till about three – don’t you wish YOU were a writer, too?  Uh-huh.  No really, I had to make an emergency run to Radio Shack for the studio – drummers get testy if their headphone cables blow in the middle of a session.  And make a deposit and do all this scanning.  But anyway, the shower was before I remembered that I had six heavy bales of grass hay that we’d put out in the sun to dry out because the barn had flooded again during irrigation deSPITE my efforts with the poop-dikes.  And I had to move those bales out of Jetta’s jail before I could put Jetta back INTO Jetta’s jail, so about twenty minutes after my shower I was worse off than I’d been before.)  I like eggs with cheese, bacon, ham, onion, garlic, mushrooms and numberless other things, not necessarily all at one time and in pretty much any combination.  Here is where I consider diversity to be a useful concept.  Yummm.  And that, my dears, is where I’m headed right NOW.

           

            More shots of Heaven.  Had a whole troup of faeries running around in here yesterday, complete with sparkle wings and faery houses.  Mostly, they swung on the rope swing and squealed.

Maybe we can get Misty to post faery pictures?????

 

 

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Twilight and other purloined morpheme packets –

Posted on August 20, 2008 by K

I don’t like it when a word—especially one I have a special fondness for like, say, “lunch”—is hijacked by one particular group or circumstance, and fenced off so that I can’t use them they way I’ve always used them, the way they were made to be used. Like “gay.” Like “Dick.” This becomes especially problematic when you have friends who are married to each other whose names are (I am not making this up) Dick and Gaye.

And along comes twilight. I’m guessing not a whole lot of you know “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” but it’s one of my favorites, one my mother and father used to sing together on our way to Lake Arrowhead. In it is the sweet, poetic and calming word “twilight”—which was not meant to convey any sense of vampires, vapid sexual attraction, violence or edge. But in this day and age, I hate even to write the word in my title up there because of the baggage it’s acquired.

Lorena, you can skip this one—you and I have already talked it out.

The Book (that’s the variable)was introduced to me by a woman I’d had reason to respect. There she was, gushing – with shining eyes – about it. So, okay. I’m always up for a good read.

But then Chaz got ahold of it and read it first. I cannot use the word “gush” to describe her response—more like an eruption, a detonation. Hate, hate, hate. If she’d been a gnasher, that book would have ended up as cage liner. And then I talked to Rachel, who said the same things with just about the same chaotic energy. At that point, I figured I really was going to have to read it.

Besides, I’d already half promised I’d do a review.

Now let me say this before I start: I am a writer. Not a great writer. You don’t have to be great to be published. And anybody could turn anything I have to say about this back on my own stories. You are welcome to do that. Writing is not an exact science. A smart writer learns between books, deepens her understanding of craft and humanity. I’m into that. The one thing I have always held as sacred is the responsibility I have to my audience—especially my young audience. The way I see it, any public voice should enrich and wisen the world, not just harvest from it.

I could kick myself for not taking notes as I read. But then, I read it mostly in the bathroom. Honestly, there were so many things to write about—the ironies were almost worth the days and days of agony. I couldn’t wait to write it all up. I was going to be SOOOO witty.

Then Ginna sends me this link, and darned if this woman didn’t use up all my best material. Read this, but not till you finish me, please, because she’s really good.  And funny and ironic and exactly what i want to be when I grow up:

STOP. Don’t click it yet. My gosh.  At least finish the page first.

http://borrowedlight.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-i-think-twilight-sucks-and-other.html

So, here comes the opinion:

Ew. 

1) This kind of Penny Dreadful drivel is a blow to the vision of our First Fathers who considered intelligence and education to be fundamental to a free society. In other words, they expected us to use our brains, and probably hoped we’d rise above flatulence and burping as our primary source of entertainment. But back then, they taught kids Latin and Greek. Now we’re just glad if they’re READING.

Storytelling and structure. 135 pages of nothing but whining: a selfish, supercilious, downright boring little protagonist. Where I come from, you get rejection letters for letting one single empty, boring paragraph go by, and here, somebody’s making bank on THOUSANDS of empty paragraphs.

The sentence structure wasn’t that bad. At first. But then, you keep getting the same words thrown at you: topaz, alabaster, cold, uh-Uh-UH-LUST. You lose track of everything. “Oh, wait – didn’t she say this just like . . . did I put the book down and lose my place? No, wait – it says that here, too.  And fifty pages from here.”  Like sitting down to eat a 16 oz Twinkie (no disrespect to Wonder).

This is how I see it: the author’s skill is in setting up the situation and letting the reader fill in the awful blanks with her own fantasies. You know, like those office buildings people build so they can rent out the space by the hour to people who don’t have offices of their own. Cardboard standup characters you can move around in your head. MMMMMM.

2) And the serious part: of Good Report and Praiseworthy, this is surely not. In fact, this book – written by an LDS woman – is brimming with tacit lessons. Nasty, wrong, harmful lessons. Lies, in fact. She messes with the reader’s sense of right and wrong—and don’t you roll your eyes at me. The old expression “you are what you eat” is only too horribly true in terms of media consumption. Because media tinkers with concept, and concept is the building block of character, perspective – and eventually, of real time choices and action.

As I was talking to a good friend who’d really enjoyed the book, these little lines started forming between her eyebrows. “Yeah,” she said thoughtfully, “I realized that when my husband came around, I wanted to hide the book.” Her conclusion: the book had been a guilty pleasure, reminding her of all those little sexual twinges of teen-hood.

So I posed this question: “Would it bother you—handing your daughter written material in which a nice LDS author assures her that:

1) Teenagers really do know better than their parents, especially when it comes to love. So

2) It’s okay to lie to your parents. It’s really okay just not to inform them about certain things, but it’s also okay to drop in the occasional actual straight-ahead lie. If it’s for love.

3) It’s totally okay to hide a boy in your bedroom. And to fake getting ready for bed so that your father won’t get a clue. Especially easy to pull off when he feels guilty about your family situation and is bending over backward to trust you.

4) Anybody who might blow your cover is a creep and a villain, and everybody on your side should hope they lose.

5) It’s also totally okay to let the boy stay over-night, because boys that YOU love are so honorable, they can totally control themselves. After all, it’s the you inside they love, even when you smell like roast beef to them. Boys can spend an entire night holding you without even putting their hands in the wrong places – for love.

6) Somehow, you will never be injured, riding in a car with a boy who drives too fast.

7) It’s perfectly normal for older men to fall madly, deeply in love with teenagers. Happens all the time. It’s real. No, really it is. Or does a 100 year old male person who is still in high school count as a boy?

8 ) Bad boys are just misunderstood. If you love them enough, they will turn out to be Just Great. And they’ll never take advantage of you. And they’re just bad enough, they can really, really protect you from all the evil out there. (Just don’t tell your stupid, boring parents.)

9) You can be just as negative and unkind to everybody as you want and be completely a klutz (never mind the dance lessons), but the sexiest, most wonderful boy in the world will see through all that and love you.

10) But most important of all: you can lie and hide and pretend and sneak around because NOTHING BAD will ever, EVER happen to you. Love will protect you from reality. And a man who is loved can never do you any harm. Especially if you love him so much that you just stop caring about your own life. It’ll all work out.

Yeah. I want my daughter to learn all of those lessons. Plus these:

1) You can be a member of a serious church and still make millions and millions of dollars just by telling stories that are in complete opposition to what the church is trying to teach its youth. Yay!

2) Reading things like this really, really can make your life better and your brain stronger. Yay!

3) In My Best Friend’s Wedding, the most sensible, kind, stable and dependable character was the single, homosexual guy. And isn’t that always the way, though? In this book, the only “functional” family is the Vampire family. Yay!! Normal families – like with moms and dads, even who stay together? Boring. Kids really need to find something more interesting and compelling and inspiring. Something with edge. Something to substitute for their own boring fam. YAY!

4) Even though a guy has lived for over 100 years – and is still, somehow, in High School (yeah, and I spent 600 pages wondering why the heck somebody hadn’t noticed that he’d been in the year book about 98 times over the years) – he can feel totally intellectually and emotionally satisfied by making conquest of an adolescent girl. Even a girl who has nothing remotely merciful to say about even one of her schoolmates – who are all obviously totally beneath her in understanding, maturity and interestingness. Wow. I know I’d just LOVE dating a sixteen year old boy.

Aside from things I can’t get around, like – am I supposed to buy marble-cold skin as attractive and exciting? Cold lips? Didn’t Romeo have cold lips at one point—and didn’t Juliet find that at least mildly disturbing? And what is so fine about your skin glittering in the light? As if that’s part of vampire lore. Like reading minds is part of it – NOT. Is this guy’s real super power gargantuan pheromones?

And here is the crux of things: this story is a badly told “Tam Lin,” one of the class of tales that “Beauty and the Beast” belongs to. It’s an ancient motif that women can’t resist: the innocent woman meets the Bad Man. He may be disfigured, he may be enchanted, he may simply be a monster of whatever kind. But only she can sense the pain and frustrated good inside of him. And he doesn’t eat/beat her, and doesn’t die of boredom in her innocent, not-close-to-edgy company. Instead, he finds himself attracted to HER. Because he, too can see inside souls.

In “Tam Linn,” he is a prisoner of the Faery Queen, and if his girl wants to save him, she must, on a certain night, grab him and hold on to him no matter what he turns into. Which she does. He’s a bear, a snake, a ravening wolf, a fire – but she faithfully holds on, not letting any of that touch her – until the enchantment is broken, and what she finally holds in her arms is the great, innocent, loving hearted young man she ALWAYS KNEW HE WOULD BE.

In “Beauty,” the woman tames the beast, saves him, comforts his loneliness – and in some unlikely, miraculous way, she is the Only One he could ever love, which crowns her with that ultimate glowing halo of desirability.

No matter how boorish, how self-centered and shallow she may be – how clumsy, how bad-haired, how charmless, judgmental and whining – any female who reads this book knows she’s GOT to be better than Bella – and look what Bella got: the undying (yes the pun is deliberate) love of a misunderstood, pathetically honorable, lonely bad boy who has waited a hundred years to give his cold and lifeless heart to somebody who smells like dinner.

Women refuse to give this story up. They cup it in their hands, breath life into it, shield it from the winds of truth. Why? Because it’s SO romantic.

In real life, women who believe in this concept often end up pregnant outside of marriage, beaten inside and out of marriage, left abandoned with children, browbeaten, controlled, afraid – beaten down to nothing. Caged, ruined. Oh, yes – once in a while the tale will be true – just often enough that every woman will just KNOW that she is that one in a million, and her love will win.

Don’t you hope your daughter is that brave?

And aren’t you glad an LDS woman is teaching her to be that brave?

 

My sister sent me this just today:

“I just had lunch with a good friend of mine who works for Scholastic and had done so for years and years. She told me that the 4th Twilight book was the first book that Scholastic [which is not the publisher, but THE bookseller to young people] has ever pulled from their list of available books. She said that they felt that the book was far too ……graphic for them to carry. Evidently she claims that she never wrote those books for children to read so she wasn’t concerned with trying to make sure they were child friendly.

Scholastic knows that kids read those books and they do carry the 1st three but drew the line at the fourth. They never received a copy early for preview but assumed that it would be OK like the first three so they had the fourth in all of their advertising for this school year. They had to pull it all and redo…..very expensive for Scholastic. I think she can’t ever plan on them considering one of her books again.”

And this is the series that parents are buying for their daughters, the series that young women and old women are so eager to get their hands on, they stay up till midnight to grad their copy, fresh off the presses. Wow. But then, it was ONLY the 4th that was so bad. Like, the other three weren’t written out of the same brain with the same perspectives?

Of course there is a difference between what you write for children and what you write for adults. But the difference should not be in quality of craft or in the core ethics and morals that keep humanity from imploding. The difference is that some situations are more appropriate for people of more experienced life. Not because they can “handle” absurd and destructive behavior, but because their days are concerned with conflicts that are outside of a child’s venue.

Here are a few quotes from a facebook group populated by high school kids:

[Thread title: Drunk Editor: [general SIC]

Where do people get off that Twilight is actually good writing. I read on chapter and honestly, it was as if Ms Myers couldn’t find a thesaurus. She used the same adjective, smoldering, about 4 dozen times! Either the publisher didn’t have any other words on their presses, the thesaurus was thrown out the window, or the editor was drunk. The later is the most likely.

amen to that! I tried to read it. I got about halfway and just couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s not exactly shoddy writing, but the redundant verbosity of the generic literature of Stephenie Meyer deeply saddened me. The mystery of why some people actually like this long-drawn out and boring scrawl of a story is still unsolved.

Not only is Ms. Meyer’s prose poor, her characterization is what made me shudder after each page. I forced myself through the first and second in order to get a better stand in defending my opinion, and I think I’ve gotten it pretty well down. She was so obsessed with creating the perfect man that she completely forgot about her main character, who I swear is schizophrenic; she is in no way relatable and is constantly whining about something or other. Edward himself is the biggest fop who ever got smeared into literature. He has created unrealistic expectations for boys who want to attract stupid, air-headed thirteen year-old girls.

Another thing I’ve been wondering about: why is it that people STILL read them when they’ve admitted that it’s a book to be read when you have no ounce of brain power? I don’t get it. They admit that the book’s pornographic; they say that it’s rather stupid; they all will tell me that they’ve read far better books? Why?! (Mind you, these are select few. Most of the fans are really brainless OMG!@!!!!! EdWARED CUllLENSSSS!!!!! <3<3<3<3!!!!!! and all that jazz.)

Is will power shrinking or something? Do people just need their soft-core porn? It’s sickening.]
———— 0 ————

That last question is worthy of consideration.

Did you know that television execs have been known to refer to their potential audiences as “trailer trash”? They mean you and me. We qualify because we’re watching the stuff they put out. They know that they aren’t offering art to us. They’re offering simple minded stories driven by sex and adventure for the most part, humor that isn’t amazing or witty or complex. They are simply grinding out what will make them money.

Media people don’t care about you. They don’t care how stupid they make you over time. They don’t care about your life – what will happen to you if you buy what they trot out to entertain you, or if their stories encourage you to behavior that results in broken marriage, teen pregnancy, violence. They don’t care if you’re hurt, if you ache with disappointment and regret, if your brains dry up and blow away – as long as they get your money.

And with this book and its sequels, you can bet this publisher is no different than the rest of these media jerks. They want your money, and they don’t care what they do to you as long as they get it.

With men, pornography is obvious: they look at pictures and films of naked, big chested women who magically want nothing but sex from them. That is male fantasy. You can recognize the vector; you can say, “Put down that magazine (DVD, whatever) because it’s evil.” And you know it is, because you can see the pictures in one second and tell.

So what constitutes pornography? To me, it’s anything that manipulates the brain, targeting fantasies that manipulate brain chemistry, yielding physiological responses that have not been worked for honestly, earned by deeds and devotion and sacrifice, and certainly not tied to any personal future responsibility. They give people the gift of lust when they are safely(?) alone. It hinges on sexuality, but you could make a case that advertisements for hair replacement and high class sedans may qualify.

With women, the turn on is in the words. I could write a thousand sentences that’d have the power to ignite brain chem in a sexual manner. But I won’t. Because it’s too darn easy, for one thing. You don’t even have to be poetic. You just use the right three words and suggest the rest.

And I won’t do it because it’s an evil, counterproductive, damaging thing to do to people—especially when the audience is so willing, and so unaware of what you are doing to them. I remember this boy who was dating a sweet, innocent but hot friend of mine in college. They were making out, and he pulled back, asking her, “Would you even know if I was taking advantage of you?” I have to laugh. She always wore a wig that gave her this tremendous hair she did not actually have. She could have asked him the same question.

But I digress. Women get turned on by language. Not usually by visuals. They can sit there with a book full of words that looks like any other book full of words – and nobody recognizes it as pornography because there are no pictures. And as men’s pornography is evil because it’s actually a drug that changes their chemistry, so women’s pornography takes minds away from reality, from the work-a-day truth of laundry and school and taking care of kids and doing chores and promises them some kind of supernal love that will save them from all fear, all insecurity, all discomfort. Mother’s little helper? Not really, because mother has to live in reality.  And the truth?  Little vacations in brain chemistry get a little more permanent every time you take them.

Will power is no different now than it ever was. We just have more temptation lying around, free. People don’t need porn, but they want escape. They want life to be good. They want to be frightened by scary things, all the time knowing that things will turn out all right in the end. So they go to movies and read stories that are complete fantasy – and I mean by that, promising them consequences that don’t match the reality of life – so they can feel a catharsis (is that like mental orgasm?) and for a moment, believe that all life will be really glowing and triumphant in the end.

The fans are, in short, getting a nice little guilty buzz out of the book, and they like it, and nobody, including Deseret Book, seems to get it that what’s happening here is deeply unhealthy.

Wind up:

The protagonist talks about that old truck her father gave her somewhere in the first—I don’t know— five hundred pages. The truck becomes a metaphor for me for the entire story: that solid old truck, she notes, may not be fancy, but it’ll sure keep her safe in case of an accident.

Right. Well, a big rigid steel bodied vehicle is about the most dangerous thing you could drive. In an impact, the rigid body absorbs none of the force. Instead, it passes all the force right into the cab, and it’s the soft body inside that ends up absorbing all of it. What I’m saying is that 1) the author has not bothered to inform herself about the truth of the physics here, and passes on a romantic and dangerous folk truth which she probably believes and 2) she promises safety where there is really great potential for increased harm.

Like I say, the BorrowedLight blogger is a WHOLE lot funnier than I am on this subject. Sorry. This just seems to engage the chaperone in me.

One of her commenters said, “What really bothers me about this whole Twilight thing is that people are falling in love with bad writing. The characters are one-note, it’s all terribly predictable, and it’s STUPID.?

Can the church say, “AMEN???” And yet millions of these things fly off the shelf.  And millions of “good” LDS women are devouring it.  And right now, at this moment, I find myself asking, “Why is that?”  I think I’m afraid of the answer.

To be honest, this mess is no worse than the bodice rippers out there.  What makes it so pernicious is that it’s being served up as YA, and it’s written by a woman who, being LDS, should have way more class and way more sense.  This statement shouldn’t take a thing away from what I’ve said above.  Women should be smarter than this.  Than this and all its ilk.

If you want an actual English Teacher’s exegesis on the use of syntax and structure of dialogue, I can serve. But don’t ask if you don’t need it. I’d have to open that book again, and really? I’ve got so many better things to do.

Posted in Book reviews, IMENHO (Evidently not humble) | Tagged , | 39 Comments

What I did with my weekend –

Posted on August 15, 2008 by K

August 10, journal:

[Note: it occurs to me that my ending question (last post) may have appeared to have been rhetorical.  It was a real question.  Which still pleads for an answer.  Advice.  Comfort.  Shared shame.]

This is what I meant to post yesterday:

I have been working hard with my manure. Really. I have. And this is why:

 When you build your barn on a bed of tiny gravel, you need to take a lot of stuff in consideration. Like the way heavy buildings sink into tiny gravel, and the tendency of water to actually sort of rise pretty high when it meets an obstacle. Like a dam. Or a barn. It’s best to think of these things before you build. The alternative is — poop dikes.

Manure has wonderful water blocking properties. If you have enough of it in one place and you stamp it down really, really hard, you can make a pretty find dam out of it.   So it is that my driveway and the back of my barn are both lined with carefully mounded and tamped down dikes, homemade out of stuff I had, just lying around my barn.

0807-25-Hayboys1

This is what you start with when you manufacture manure.  It is worth taking a moment to illustrate the work that goes into the making of this useful and biodegradable material.

Most of this kind of work is done in the morning. I call it early morning because it’s the first thing I do in the day. Which means that Early, around here, = about eight o’clock. I used to love rising at near dawn on a summer’s day, showering in bird-song and expecting magic. But I am old now, and there is little magic about manure, really, except for the fact that it is evidence of horses. Horses are magical. When they are not stepping on you or shaking you down for treats.

Hay Boys 4

These are the hay boys: (left to right) Spencer, Brennan, Austin and Nathan (sibs, the last two). You know you are lucky when you’ve got friends like these guys, who will show up and work themselves almost to death, just because they love to help.

Hay Boys 1

Notice the counterbalance

Hay Boys 2

Spencer and Brennan are – wait, are they fifteen yet?   

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Weston, our farrier and manure supplier.  Hay, I mean.  Hay supplier.

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Nathan is nineteen, first year of college on his way to a mission.  I shanghaied Nathan and Austin at the Pioneer Day breakfast – over pancakes: “Hey!!  What are you doing this morning?  Wanna lift 500 pounds before lunch?  Pretty please?

 

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Another shot at that counter balance.  Makes for an interesting stride.

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Brennan, who is our son in Murphy’s place, hauls his weight.  Well, about five times his weight.  And all of this without a murmur or complaint.

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Side by side with Guy, he took the tough position – inside the trailer, stacking.  We are honored that his mother is willing to share him with us.

Hay Boys 3

This is why we wear masks.  And what I mean by inside the trailer.

I think the point here is that K, in the morning, is not a fashionably clean person. I get out of bed, blink a few times, throw on my exercise clothes and my stinky barn shoes (which are left outside) and drive down to the barn to let out the howling masses. Then I shovel. Then I construct, bringing the car in as the heavy squishing equipment, and moving the fences so that the car can get in there to squish what it needs to squish where it needs to squish it.

Then I go home.

On Friday, I stopped by Rachel’s hoping to sneak in a little Samaritan manure shoveling there – she’s been so sick, and last week had to get all the hay in (40 850 pound bales, stacked by neighboring tractor) while her husband and older sons were all off at Scout Camp. But she was already out there, her four youngest kids hanging out in the wilds of the pasture, finishing up. So we dug up some goats’ heads (always a fine social opportunity) before I headed home.

I kicked off the shoes, fed myself breakfast, and spent a few hours scanning old family documents for my new brain-sucking project: a hardback collection of all the genealogical pictures I’ve inherited from my folks. Then it was up and out to take the horses back in and tidy up the barn for the day.

 

Texas Dad

The man who gave me all the history.  Boxes of it.  Boxes and boxes of it.  And won’t come up to live with me so I can make him help me put these books together.  Can you believe it?  

 

(Texas aside:

Joce, all grown up

So Gin – guess who we ran into at the home airport? She came in on the same flight I did, bless her. They’re living in Austin.)

On Friday as I worked, I saw a suspicious threesome tramping East along Center Street. I’d left the car down at the far end of the driveway, open and unlocked.  So very few people actually walk Center Street down this way, and most of them on the other side of the street where there is a sidewalk. But these three were on the rural side and too close to my car, so I kept a cynical eye on them till they were well past.

When I was finished a few minutes later, I climbed into the car and started off East toward home. And there were the three walkers, still slogging along up ahead. Let me explain that even with the sidewalk, the west end of Center is hardly a walkable neighborhood. Sometimes we get tourists from the RV park down by the lake tramping up the road to find a coke at the local convenience store – a good twelve blocks or so East.

All there is to see on the way there are the fields — corn now higher than your shoulder, hay just cut. Next, you’ll see the little old unspectacular cinderblock houses that line the road mid-way, and after those the encroaching  middle class, leaking ever westward over the last few years. It’s a beautiful walk if you love wide skies, gorgeous mountains and growing things, but not exactly tourist fodder.  And it’s all gravel and weeds on the south shoulder.

Once in a while we get odd walkers of differing nationalities and legalities, and or joggers or walkers – again mostly on the north side of the street. But these three – as I passed them, I knew they were way out of place. I don’t know what it was, perhaps they were dressed too well for walking the million miles of dusty West Center. Perhaps it was in the way they moved—walking as though they were a touch bewildered and dismayed to find themselves there. And then I realized that they were very Asian. Which might not mean anything, except for the fact that it is simply a rare face-type down that-a-way. And they were clean, which means they were not just coming off the lake, not farming, not camping and not jogging.

All of this together pulled my car into a U turn, and before I knew it, I was asking the father of the two trailing girls if I could give them a ride somewhere. He studied me, his face pleasant but thoughtful. The decision did not take long – with a grin, he nodded. “Yes. Please,” he said.

I pulled across the street, and they piled in. The daughter who sat in the front with me had the English, but all did well. Very nice people – lost in the wilderness. “Where shall I take you?” I asked. And they gave me a number. “The address of your motel?” I asked. No. The number of the bus that had dropped them off way East and North of where we were at the moment. They had taken it with the intention of walking down to see Utah Lake. Nobody walks over fourteen blocks to see Utah Lake. I’m not sure anybody walks three blocks to see Utah Lake. Without pulling a boat, anyway.

They were from Taiwan, here for three days, most of which already spent exploring BYU where the daughter in the back was soon going to start her studies. Now, here they were, cameras full of Utah Lake and environs, almost late for their travel connections, no chance of finding the right bus and almost thirty blocks to walk to get close to home. I stopped by our house to get an address for their motel (and my license) then schlepped them on up to University Avenue. I found this family absolutely charming. And certainly, they were delighted that I did not turn out to be a serial killer. I dumped them off at their motel, still in good shape.

It was only as I drove away that I became aware of the nice, warm, brown smell rising from my shoes and remembered that I hadn’t even brushed my hair. Morning doesn’t usually involve people for me. And, beliee me, when I’m hosting guests, I try to dig the gravel out of the carpet of my car. Still, they hadn’t seemed to have noticed any of this.

We’d passed the big bandstand park on 5th on the way to the lodgings.  On the corner had been a hand lettered sign: Come See the Japanese Performers.  And since the park was unusually full of folks, all seeing interested in something happening in the middle, I called Char and told her to shine herself up into town and check out it all out. I went home, changed into a human being and followed her, camera on the shoulder, to see the broo-ha-ha for myself.

It was a tour group, busses full of kids from all over the planet: Harmony in Motion, I think they called the group.  When I got there, 30 adorable kids from Kenya, all tricked out in yellow polo shirts, had just finished singing. And an actual tour bus full of Japanese tourists, stopping at the park at the same time, filled the lawns, watching the show. Some Native American kids finished up their number, and then a bunch of T-shirted American kids took the stage, hamming up “You can’t stop the beat.”

Kenyan choir

Kenyan children’s choir

The Globe, dancing together

Mixin’ it up: the world prancing together

What you’ve got here are the blue shirted Americans, the orange Japanese kids’ choir and the yellow shirts of the Kenyan kids’ choir, all “beating” together.


“I can’t figure this out,” Char said as she found me. “There are just these people from all over –”

So I found somebody who seemed to know what was going on, a woman from Scotland  who helpfully explained the group and its two week Utah tour, evidently part of a national tour. 

World Peace

I loved this.  The way all the world should be.  No tanks.  No exploitation.  Just friends.

 

Kenyan Woman in our backyard

Exotic for this particular park

The American kids moved through the audience, grabbing Kenyan and Japanese kids, dragging them onto the little stage to reprise The Beat. Raucous but energetic. And then a troup of Japanese dancers took the stage, choreography that kept moving from traditional to pop to Tai Chi. They were having the best time ever, and suddenly, I flashed on Sailor Moon – so all that posing is actually truly cultural.

Japanese Dancers 1

Japanese Dancers 2

Japanese Dancers 3

After the ldancing came a Japanese children’s choir who opened, strangely, with a rendition of “Edelweiss.” The voices were very sweet and pure, though, and the harmony sweet – and as they sang, it all began to make sense. They finished with a wonderful Japanese song. I kept trying to get Charlotte to speak Japanese to someone – anyone. It seems that one component of speaking Japanese is being traditionally reserved and shy and polite. She did unbend enough to almost whisper Japanese praise as the girls passed us, coming off stage. Interestingly, those quiet words were caught by the girls, who turned and beamed at Char.

Japanese Dancers 5

But it was Charlotte’s rude, forward American mother who cornered her favorite of the Red costumed Japanese ladies, asking personal questions like, “Where are you from?” From Japan, of course. With no English. And that’s when Charlotte really came alive, suddenly chattering along in musical, indecipherable words that lit the lady’s face with delight. I just stood there, listening to them – and watching the absolute joy passing back and forth between them.

Japanese Dancers 4

Great fun.

We spent the rest of the day working on the book and waiting for Donna, G’s aunt and my good friend, to roll into town with her hubby. I will not tell you that they took a wrong turn on the way to the restaurant and found themselves headed for Las Vegas. But I will tell you that we had a great dinner, and great conversation and then spent a couple of hours with the rest of the family, culminating in a purely accidental watching of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

Donna.JPG

I’m on a roll here.

On Saturday, I put the last touches on my dikes. Spent a little time on the way home picking up Rachel’s goatheads. Drove out to Lehi to pick up a box of ancient pictures from my brother’s house, came home, picked up Guy and headed for the Farmer’s Market. We have friends there now—Madeline, who sells her fused glass pendants, Kenna who brings her hand bound books, Dru and her husband who cut and polish and wrap their stones in silver wire. We passed up the hopeful honey seller, bought mango popsicles and pot stickers, found Noah and bought more felt goodies (Char got these adorable kiwi tipped hair clips). Char and Guy went last week, too, when I was gone and found that Noah had made special dipped “chocolate” truffles for us, each topped with a rhinestone initial.

Noah and Mr. Noah

More cute Noah

Farmer's Market Band

Finally caught the drummer with the band.  These guys are great.

And we met the lavender lady who sells lavender flavored lemonade and lavender soap and dried flower ornaments. Char is allergic to lavender, but we couldn’t resist stopping: they bring the kids and the aussie dog with them. And the Aussie is a lovely little tri-colored girl, sweet and Aussie to the heart. We talked for a while as Char and Chula lavished love on each other, and it came out that the family has to go overseas for a year or two, and aren’t sure they can take Chula with them. I found myself offering Sully’s place in our yard to her. I’d been thinking about puppies, considering Piper and Skye’s advanced age and the pain I know will be coming. But puppies are a lot of work. Then here comes Chula. And we’re used to having our hearts broken, giving dogs back – so, what the heck?

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Saying Goodbye to Sully

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Horses in for the day. And finally, the rain and thunder we’ve been waiting for all these weeks – down it came. And then today, church with people we love, and Cam and Lorri stolling over after their meetings, bringing a Scooter who now talks to himself and laughs his head off from time to time. Our hearts are lost forever.

One last story. I will not begin to talk about Texas here and now. It was a dear visit, but a little difficult at times. I am not sure that I believe in what is happening to my mother. This story is about the flight home. I was tired and needing to process some things—looking forward to my non-stop couple of hours flight. A little Sudoku. A little reading. Maybe even sleep.

But I changed seats so a father and daughter, split up, could sit together, and found myself in the middle seat next to a ten year old boy (eleven in September) who was traveling alone. Going home to his dad after three months of being with his mom in Texas. Kids’ name was Chance. And five minutes hadn’t gone by before I was thoroughly charmed. A cheerful, open face – great eyes, alive with light. Verbal as the day is long. We decided that the plane, taxiing to take off, was definitely going faster than a Lamborghini. We talked about everything from his head-roping champion daddy to theology to getting good grades in math to his very, very, very famous thirty year old champion eventing horse. He explained his frustration with adults: “I just want to know the truth. I just need to know the truth. But they don’t give you a chance. They don’t even let you explain yourself.”

He told me a long story about his half brother, who spoke up when he shouldn’t have – reporting something that happened to his father, when all the time, that brother had been playing a video game and had no idea what had actually happened, sparking a family feud. “That was just wrong,” he said, eyes sparking.

But hard on the heels of this, his feeling about his father – oh, I can’t remember his metaphor, but he painted a picture of some extremely exciting kid situation. “That’s exciting,” he said. “Really exciting. But you know what? That’s nothing to how excited I am to see my dad.” He bragged on his dad and told me story after story, telling me more with the joy in his face and the pride in his voice. He invited me to a fair way up north to watch his dad rope, and I had to explain that I could not go. “But I know your father will do really well,” I told him. “I know he’ll be great.” And I did know it. I was seeing through the son’s eyes.

That kid stopped talking, looked at me with those great eyes and said, very solemnly, “Thank you.” Then he threw his arms around me and hugged me hard. In the end, he remarked that maybe he might just like me more than he even liked his friends. “I know that’s weird,” he said. “For a kid to like an old person.” Then quickly, “Not that you are old. Just older.”

I couldn’t help but think, as a person who writes for a young audience, how adults underestimate children. When you hear a small town Utah ten year old—who is worried about getting into college already—use a phase like, “I never had the opportunity,” you know that kids are so much better, smarter, more articulate than their media reps allow. They think more deeply than the du rigeur smart-mouth, shallow minded kid characters are ever allowed to do in so many adult generated stories and scripts.

This kid looked me in the eye, invited me into his world and held his own in our conversation. Heck, he floated the whole boat – for two solid hours. By the end of that flight, we had established private jokes and knew each other’s kin. Does that sound like the media’s brand of kid to you? But it sounds like ever so many kids I have known.

This is the kind of kid I love to write. As ephemeral and unlikely to many literary gate-keepers as any chimera. (I was definitely not thinking of you, Rosemary, my darling girl). And how sad is that?

Well, there you have it—Feasting on People.

Sounds terrible.

Feels delicious.

The kitchen window

What the heck?  My kitchen window.

Posted in Just life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Not what I meant to post today:

Posted on August 14, 2008 by K

August 14

I really need to post these things when I first write them. Otherwise, they just keep expanding, or being usurped by new ideas or freaking events. I hate to push patience, suspecting that not so many folks have days to dedicate to reading my brain. So I don’t like to go long. And I do hate to post anything these days without giving you something to look at though. And messing with images is a deep time investment. I love it. But it’s costly in the face of now. So I’m slow. Such a deal.

Funny little thing: this morning, I had a tiny self-vision. Here I am, moving at light speed – trying to get all the genealogical stuff I brought home from my dad’s (saving it from otherwise-oblivion) organized, scanned – at least really looked at. Plus the fam and the horses and the dogs and the bills. Minus the house, poor thing. But if you could put filters over your eyes, you’d see that behind it all, I am somehow frozen. Like freeze tag. A translucent shape behind all the movement, holding – holding – holding while Murphy is gone, while Ginna is gone, while my mother and father take hesitant, reluctant steps forward into a part of life none of us believe will ever come to us. A place I am headed for myself, soon enough. I find myself afraid.

Noah

Noah, my great great grandfather.

I see the psychology in my mad dash to Blurb all of these pictures. I have pictures of my grandparents and great grandparents and great, great grandparents – people whose lives are like a strap, anchored in an age that had just seen the ravages of the civil war, and laced forward through the Victorian age and the discovery of light bulbs and toilets and cars and refrigerators to fasten around my waist.

My Mother Tyner, born in 1868, met her husband in a buggy race into town. She lived on to see the Concord make New York to Paris in three hours. Is it significant that I, myself, have lived to see that headlong achievement get ahead of itself and die on the tarmac? I hope not. But it seems likely.

Musa

Musa, his daughter.  Nellie Wren’s sister who died young.

Maybe I think that by scanning these photos (stiff photos made by primitive but very precise cameras) I can stabilize the time? Stop it from pulling away backwards? That by touching the faces of people I have never seen in life, but who are tied to me by blood and humanity, maybe I can bring us closer in reality – like pulling the strings on the mouth of a velvet bag. I think about the pictures of me (the few that have been taken – ugh) left behind for the new real people to throw in a drawer until they, too, realize that time is linear, that actual reality does not grind to a glorious halt in their thirties. Will they sense how I felt about their own fathers and mothers (my children), their grandmothers and grandfathers (my children even later)? Will they know that once I breathed?

I am suspended, then, maybe waiting for a sound, a music that might make sense of my mother’s situation, that might make her crash only a movement in the music, and not a predictor of the threatening, inexorable finale of my own life.

I suppose that could have me poised on the tip of hope.  Waiting in the air for the ground to stop shaking.

DadAndSpot

My dad.  Aha, you are thinking, this is where the horse thing got started.  But no.  Take a good look at the boy’s face.  He hated this pony.  I think it’s a rather fine pony, myself.

The outside of me would be moving at lightspeed no matter what the future might hold. Can’t help myself. Maybe if I took a good look around, I’d find myself farther from the great drop-off than it seems. Murphy will come home, probably, as Cam did, to find the love of his life and himself suddenly become the father. I find all of this a little puzzling, really. Maybe a lot puzzling.

I end with a question for you: my mom always kept a spotless, simple, plain, lovely, organized house. I have a mussy, filled with raw materials and half-finished projects house. It’s dusty, and the windowsills do not bare close examination. But it’s basically kind of clean and organized. Bed isn’t made. Laundry not folded. Documents and photo books and bareback saddles in the oddest places.

I feel very guilty about this. When the kids were little, aside from Fischer Price and its ilk, this house was like my mom’s. Not a crumb to be seen. But now, I’d have to stop to achieve that. I’d have to not write stories and not scan photos and not mess with fabric and not train horses to stop and fold what I can just as easily grab off the back of my poor, baby-less bedroom rocking chair.

But is it okay to make that choice? Is it wrong to have a few un-formal things lying around the living room and dust on the lamp shades? Is it more important to have the house Better Homes and Gardens presentable than to not stop seeing the dust and live instead in relationships and creative projects?  We’re not talking Call-in-the-health-department mess in my house, by any means. Just a mild case of Chaos.

 I just wonder what you think.

Oh, and there’s a snake in my house. Not my fault: Little Cam, our nephew, asked G to catch him one in the yard, and G, a little sick the past few days and ordered not to work, finally remembered to do it – a tiny garter snake about eight inches long. Like a kid, G brought it into the house, put it in a number ten can with friendly foliage, then placed it, topless, in the middle of the foosball table.

Of course, it escaped.

We took the table apart, looked all over. But now, on top of everything else, we got fauna.  Not that I mind especially. Those snakes are really cute and all.  I’m just afraid for the snake, especially with these wolves that live here. I think the house is actually too clean for the little snake to grow into an allegator.

But I could be wrong about that.

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations, Just life | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

And now we pause for a message from . . .

Posted on July 26, 2008 by K

First of all, gotta tell you how much I LOVED the comments.  Heck, I kicked off my shoes and ran through them barefoot.  I closed my eyes and poured them over my head.  I lit their fuses and watched them explode into shimmers against the night sky.  Nothing like a few lines from a friend to make you feel like you’re connected to something miraculous and wonderful.  Booyah!

This is a short post, and more significant: nothing but a piece of shameless promotion.

I have a friend who is fighting to save the family farm – and she is a glass artist, a master of character, and a mensch besides.  So I am sending all of you the link to her website. because if you can’t save a family farm, what good is America – especially when you have so much fun doing it.  She makes glass beads, but not “bead” in the round with a hole in it sense.  She does tiny, funny, charming animal sculptures suitable for staring at or wearing.  Someday, I’m going to talk Murph into making a feature film with these guys as the models for the animation.  She also does custom work – got a puppy you want immortalized?  A pony you dream of?   And alligator in your basement?  Teila can do it up for you.  I have about twenty of her little things, and if I were a rich man (du-du-doya, doya doaya), I’d buy enough to string across a room.  She has auctions on ebay.  Some great glass work goes down there!!!

http://www.beastiebeads.com/home.html

So there.  I am sending you over to take a look.  One of you guys is bound to bite!!  And that’s all, folks!!!

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Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Hay, Marketing and a Little Light Housekeeping

Posted on July 21, 2008 by K

            The housekeeping part will come first: you may recall how every half-year to year I do a “Still want to be on my list?” plea?  I don’t like to think I’m sending to anybody who’d rather not feel guilty, obligated, harassed, annoyed, confused by getting my self-centered little outpourings of cognitive dissonance.  And so, once again, I am doing this.  But this time, I am asking you to please append a comment onto this particular article – just a “Hi.  Thanks a lot – I hate doing comments” without any other substance to it all would be nice.  And then I will know who wants to continue to get these emails and who does not.

            I am sad about comments.  I told a friend of mine that I try to leave comments whenever I read something somebody has worked hard to present for my perusal – for one, because I want them to feel that I am interested in their lives – because I am.  And also because I do think things or feel things when I see pictures of my loved ones, or read something that makes me laugh, and since my feeling is that we spend way too much time assuming that people know we love them, and not enough expressing delight in one another (which goes a long way to relieving chemical anxiety), I try hard to jot down what I am thinking as I read (well, okay – not EVERYTHING I think).  That way, the writer will not feel like they are shouting fruitlessly and pathetically into a dark, acoustically dead universe.  This is my philosophy, of course.  It doesn’t have to be anybody else’s.

            I can see these comments blossoming into a conversation, actually – people asking questions, other people commenting on comments.  But maybe we don’t have time in the world for all the possible conversations.  I just enjoy my little Facebook groups and the relationships I’ve discovered there so much, it seems sad that comments are just comments and not miniature tea parties.

            Oh, well.  So anyway, there you are – LIST PRUNING WEEK.

G – actually not pruning.  Cutting down a windfall.  With a chainsaw.  From a ladder – which is leaning against the tree.  My hair is turning gray for a reason.  No, really – he knows what he’s doing.  I hope.

No worries.  Guy and the Great Swinging Rope.

And the tree from which it hangs –

The yard.  All this counts as housekeeping, doesn’t it?

            Oh – also.  I have included two more pages for those who might be interested.  One is a posting of Murphy’s emails (you can see them on the menu to the right, under the blogroll and stuff).  One is a posting of notes I’ve taken as I study for my Sunday School lesson.  I tell  you, reading this stuff, such thoughts come – ideas, connections – I get very excited studying this stuff.

G, laying the new floor in the studio addition (don’t breath while looking at this – and where the heck is his mask?)

Feeding babies, conversing with dogs

 

THE POST:

            When you live in the middle class buffer, as I always have, there’s a lot of stuff you miss.  I think I told you once about the teacher who said, “I don’t understand these stupid farmers – don’t they get it that we buy our food from grocery stores now?  Why go to all that work when you don’t have to?”  This said to local class, in which was the child of a friend of mine, the child of a farmer.

 

            I’m not sure that I ever really understood the breathtaking significance of weather before I needed hay.  But hay is a great teacher.  This very afternoon, I heaved a sigh of terrific relief when, as rain started to fall for the first time since spring, I realized that John our horse neighbor, long time farm man, had finally bailed the hay that had been lying for five days under heavy and threatening skies – and that he was quickly throwing those bales (not throwing – you should see the complicated and scary machines they use for these things) up onto a flat bed stack.

            He should have been in church.  But church sometimes falls in the worst of times – and hay has a lot in common with small babies: when it’s ready, you jump.

            I had been praying over that hay, trying to keep the rain off it.  With alfalfa, you cut the hay after it shows just so many purple flowers in the spring.  That’s your first cut – the one with the weeds in it.  Great for cows and okay for horses – lots of sugar in it, I think.  Maybe I’m wrong. 

          Then, about the end of June, maybe? Maybe first week in July.  You cut the second cutting – the full and gorgeous green cut with leaves and purple flowers pressed all the way through it. This is the horse cut, for those who are lucky enough to get it.  Come August, you will get a third cut, good also for horses, but not as good.  More expensive, because the people who have put off buying are now anxious to buy.  And finally, maybe a fourth cut in September – all stems and fiber.

 

            But this year, spring took its time.  My horses were out on the pasture two to three weeks late – which means my hay stack was down to green dust.  And the hay was later, too.  Which means there will be less of it this year.

 

           The hay I wanted, John’s beautiful hay – no weeds, no mold, just right – I will not get.  He will need it for himself.  So I am cut loose in the market, and I’m seeing hay that makes me cringe, for sale at horrible inflated prices.  What choice do I have?  People are selling horses – but who will buy?  And I never would do that.  The horses are family.  Fortunately, I have a friend who had first cutting.  We won’t starve.  But we have to haul it in the trailer, fifty bales at a time.

            Funny.  I am connected by all this to all kinds of people I don’t know personally – hay people who need my prayers, even if I don’t know their names.

 

            We now have almost half of the hay we’ll need to live through the next year.  It’s a whole new way of looking at life.  And what with the lifting and the hauling and the breathing hard, a hardy way of living it.

 

 

 

            We went to the Farmer’s Market again, this time just to get pictures so we could share the love.  Well, you know – ostensibly, that’s the reason why we were there.  But going to a live market is a little like “visiting” puppies: we go, thinking in our infinite naiveté that we can look and leave empty handed.  Ha.  We came away from the market poor in bucks, but with plenty of bootie: fresh, plump, firm and juicy peaches, more felt delights, semi-precious stones bought from the people who’d cut and polished and wire wrapped them, mango ice pops. 

Chaz, in a lovely pose, sampling the gourmet breads and dips.  The really lively dips.

20080718FarmMarket03

 

 

A random child, looking for mithril armor.  The craftsman, in the blue shirt, swears that this is the real deal.

Dru, setting up her booth.  She and her husband have a business: Rocks – we dig ’em.  They dig, cut, polish (also buy from exotic locales) then drill, set, wrap.  We spent an hour just here.

I will give my daughter to the first man who brings us a load of opals – daughter’s fave

 

20080718FarmMarket12

Wire wrapped cabochons

The necklace I did NOT sneak back an buy for Chaz (plastic was already too hot)

I bought those peaches, there, just under the guy’s hand.  Rachel says that these guys have the best produce at the best prices.  Note the mangos.  Before you go, call and we’ll tell you where to find them.

Chaz, perusing Old Man’s Books –

The band.  Like an idiot, I cut out the drummer, who is great.  No look on his face.  Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.  The guy on the stool there sounds just exactly the way you think he’s gonna.  Last week, he did Sittin’ on the Dock of a Bay and pretty much forgot all the words.  But it was mellow.  The rest of these guys are just eye candy.

The lovely Noah (really, I’d have to write it in Chinese), with her stunning smile and her fabulous felted confections.  She is SOOOOO cute.  Chaz and I are fangirls for her.

Look at this stuff – all felt.  I need to take closer pictures.  This stuff is truly elegant.

She does Chinese food and pastry.  Honestly, I want to eat it all.  I wish the pictures did it justice.

And these little bamboo slips.  Oy.

Last week, these guys had a raft of herbs.  I just touched their lavender, and the scent stayed with me all day.  Nice for me, not so good for Chaz, who is allergic –

The local wood carvers’ guild

Chaz helpfully points out her favorite one

Buying real things from real people

           My gosh – it’s just a little place, just one sidewalk along the south side of Pioneer Park.  But going there – I don’t know.  You just feel like you’ve been to a real – market.

        Okay. I have to put a THE END here somewhere.  But the place will be there again next Saturday.  If you wanna go.  Try a mango pop.  Buy a felt napoleon, or a plate full of felt shrimp and soy beans.  And if you do that last thing?  Tell Noah we sent you.

 

 

Posted in Family, Just life, Memories and Ruminations | Tagged , , , | 38 Comments

Like a Chapter Book –

Posted on July 12, 2008 by K

This is not an illustrated tale.  It should have been, but we were doing instead of recording it all.  So for those of you who have been sliding by, just looking at the pictures, this will be a disappointment.  For those, however, who tune in for the language (and mayhem) – here is a bit of fodder for the friendship:

Journal entries –

July 10th:

            I am sitting at my desk, working away on the reclamation of my 2007 photo book, which turned out to be a very satisfactory and expensive editor’s proof – in other words, it taught me a lot about what I have been doing wrong.  I am still doing things wrong, but they are different things now, which I think is a step up.

            And while I am sitting here, I can hear through the wall Tyler Castleton, curse his knuckles, rehearsing a song with April Meservy, just before they record it.  I can’t hear anything but the piano, really – our seven foot Yamaha grand – just the chords and the rhythm.  It’s a moving song, and pirate songwriter as I am, I am hearing a million different melodies to it as he plays – all of them heartbreaking.  So I am listening and editing and tears are running down my face.  Just little ones.

            So I get up to go into the studio—my philosophy is that, if something works, you oughta tell somebody it does—and as I walk in, Tyler is starting to play a tiny bit of “Come Thou Fount,” which I’m thinking must be in the bridge somehow, and which only pulverizes me further.  I talk to Guy in the control room for a second, then dodge into the studio proper – just pop through the door – and because I tear up a little, telling Tyler I like the song, I excuse myself by explaining that M just left three weeks ago, and I am more than usually delicate (I cried at the vet’s Monday, just telling them that I appreciate the fact that they’ve been there for us).  And what does Tyler do?  Oh, he was charming and asked after Murphy and grateful for the praise.  But as I am walking back down the hall, I hear him start into “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”  And was that even nice?

            Now I’m  trying to mop myself up with copy paper.

July 11, 2008

            Yay, yay, yay.  Another studio note.  This morning, they came and got me to listen to a track and give recommendations on the background harmony lines.  I LOVE this.  I haven’t been in the studio for so long, really – not since the Priddis crash.  But as I sat there, listening to the recorded vocal and offering a number of suggestions, I realized – this is really what I do.  Somehow, at the bottom of all the other things I try, this fitting of one vocal line against another is as fundamental to me as flying should be.

            I remember when my mom taught me about harmony—sitting in the old basement at Mother Jeanne’s dark piano –  long past tuneable, but imbued with the same magic every molecule of that ancient place held – and going over “I Know that My Redeemer Lives,” a heavy, descending line.  Teaching me to sing it, and hold my own against the melody.  It was like taking the weights off my soul.  And it really is like flying: fitting that sound of your voice into all the other frequencies – diving through them, rising in brightness above them, underpinning them with shadow.  Or like a fish, slipping through the water, flashing through dappled light, bound by currents, and yet defying them, seated in the flow, and yet nosing through the threads of it – quickly, fluidly, brightly.

            When I sing in church these days, it’s always from the stand in front, and I have to sing the melody.  It never touches me and frees me – I am just the rod the others play around.  I prefer leaping.  Dancing.  Questioning.  Crossing.

            Shoot.  I gotta sing more.

            I will say this about my life: we sing, our family, and when we have the chance to do it, it is a festival of lights.

July 12, 2008

            This will sound silly, especially if you are a beastless person, but we have animals who embrace us.  Not Skye, who would rather walk between your legs or bark to express his joy at your company.  But Piper – and now, Sully, both of whom get a certain soft look in their eyes, the ears curved gently, elegantly back, and then push their foreheads softly against your chest, and remain very still – only that little pressure, a request that moves your arms to wrap around those dog shoulders, just as gently, and ends in matching stillness.

            And then, Sophie.  Sophie the terrible.  When I feed in the stalls, Sophie is a snake, darting her head over the top rail to snap at Dustin (who is often – but not always –  just minding his own business).  I have heard her teeth meet on air, and knowing that those jaws can bring 300 pounds of pressure on a thumb nail, and that those teeth can rip through horse hide easily, I wonder that I am brave enough to walk among these beasties, and do it every day.

            But it is not that part of Sophie I’m telling—it’s the other side.  The user side.  She doesn’t care for horses, but she loves us.  And yesterday, when Westin came to trim hooves sadly in need, I held Sophie’s lead rope, and we stood back, watching him finishing up Zi’s trim.

            Suddenly, the oddest thing happened.  Suddenly, my arms were full of Sophie’s head.  It had come from behind me, that elegant neck curving around my left shoulder, and the broad, smooth chocolate cheek pressed against my chest.  Again, in stillness.

            She wasn’t looking for treats – that’s Zion’s game.  She wasn’t doing anything.  Just that huge body at my back, and the embrace of that neck, and the stillness of the tucked head.  And again, my arms, almost of their own accord, were wrapped around her head – this is part of what was so odd about it; a horse cannot usually abide having its eyes covered, its head held.  To much danger in the world.  For eyes that are made to see in almost 360 degree vision, voluntary blindness is a great gift.  To me.  Given to me.  Twice.  Two hugs.  Two still silences.

           —-o—-

            This morning, Guy and Cam fetched us some hay.  Such a casual statement for such a frighteningly important thing.  Hay is getting harder to come by: thank you ethanol.  Thank you late, slow spring.  People in some places are selling their horses to anybody who will take them.  (Take them where?)

            But our friend Westin had some hay, and I bought it.  But he doesn’t deliver, which is a problem.  We need some 220 bales to make it through the winter.  The horse trailer can handle maybe 45 at a time.  We may not be farmers, but we have become haulers.

            So Guy and Cam went to Lakeshore to pick up first cutting – not my favorite, but there for us to buy.  They loaded the trailer with those seventy pound bales and brought them home to the barn, where I met them and helped (oh, big help) unload.

            Lorri came, wearing her baby, face out, in a soft carrier.  He was not interested in hay.  He, pacifier still somehow stuck in that mouth, slept through the whole thing.  I have no pictures, of course.  I called Chaz to bring the camera, but she has yet to master a stick, and the only two cars left sport them.  So I have a phone shot only.

            After the unloading, and circling the very local eateries, searching for an exciting breakfast, we ended up at home, making French toast (Guy made it – he does all the significant cooking now), which we took over to Cam and L’s house.  We ate while the Scooter slept.  I ate too much.  I eat more than Guy does.  I wonder why I can’t lose this ten pounds?

            Then Rachel  kidnapped Chaz and me (and Guy came) and off we went to the Farmer’s Market on First south, in the park.  She’d just been and found some wonderful things.  So we went with her and found some wonderful things.  There was a woman who does tie=dyed things, who had some cool Chinese silk scarves with tassels that she had dyed seductively.  The flame one, scarlet and orange yellow, wild but somehow subtle – and fabulous on Rachel.  So, behind her back, we bought it and Guy stuffed it into his pocket.

            There was a little band playing, an old, skinny black guy on guitar, singing “Dock of the Bay,” while the young other guitar player, the one with the surfer-spiked ashy hair, tried to guess which chord was coming next.  And the old guy in the big hat, no look on his face, using one stick on a loose sprung single snare.

            The hippie booth full of driftwood and bead mobiles, redolent of hemp.  The adorable Chinese girl, who with her cute anglo husband, manned a table full of the must utterly delightful and delicate felt sculptures of patisseries and sushi.  The lady with a load of fused glass pendants – one especially nice green one that Rachel bought not even behind my back, and presented to me with shining eyes.  So we were forced to come clean, retrieving the scarf from Guy’s pocket to wrap it around her waist.  No good deed goes unpunished.

            The booths full of exotic breads and home grown corn and raspberries and squash.  At the book binder’s stall, we found a medium sized journal clad in anime golden carp, put together with careful art –  a triumph of one of the world’s oldest and most respectable of professions.  We slurped mango ice sticks, picked over hair bows for Kirsten, browsed through boxes of geodes, bought dangly earrings, effusive with stars.

            I should have taken the camera, I know.  But I didn’t today.  Another day, perhaps. 

            This was a wildly extravagant use of time, and cost us far more than staying safely at home would have done; by now, that closet upstairs might have been pretty thoroughly dismantled.  But then, I would not be wearing this gorgeous piece of fused green glasses, and we’d really have missed the mango.

            Saturday is for chores, you know.  Chores and hay.

            But maybe next week, we’ll go to the market again.

 

 

Posted in Family, Just life, Memories and Ruminations | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Not so much a lie as a miscalculation

Posted on July 6, 2008 by K

I guess there is more to life after-all??? A little more, anyway.

 

This is why sultan should always be with us:

1. He is the right sort of dog.

Proof: on the night of the 4th, the air was full of sulfur and the almost omnipresent wail of emergency vehicle sirens. We notice this particularly since we are one block away from a firehouse, and any time anybody on this end of town gets himself in trouble, we hear our rescue wagons as presently as we do our own low-battery fire alarms. And since we are not far off the freeway, we hear other people’s sirens as well.

Our dogs are not bothered by this. Even when something happens on our street, which has happened one or twice over the decades, the dogs don’t seem to get into a lather about it. But on the night of the 4th, we had Sultan.

I had already cashed in the day, tucked up in my bed reading The Miracle at Speedy Motors (kind of like taking a pleasant shower). When I began to hear singing. I thought maybe it was an overtone in the cross current of all city sirens at first. Kind of a strange moaning. Then I realized it was the voice of a dog. Or a howl, anyway.

I sat up.

But our dogs don’t howl. You can’t talk them into it for anything. Boring, boring dogs.

Still – that sound.

So I go downstairs, turn the corner, and what do I see? Guy on his knees beside Sultan, howling melodiously, and Chaz, who is sick again this year (a year to the day), tucked up into the corner of the couch, doing the same thing. Actually, they were kind of handing off the song, one choking on laughter while the other took over. So I helped. We like howling. And I am particularly good at it. With my stage experience, I can even keep a straight face for minutes at a time.

Sultan’s faced snapped around, and his amber eyes met mine. I stepped it up a notch. His head snapped again, into a tilt. Then into a tilt to the other side. Both my howling buddies dissolved in laughter. But this was serious business for Sultan and I. He put his nose up and joined right in. Then there were four of us howling to the ceiling while Skye and Piper just lay there, blinking and thinking rude things about us.

Sultan got up and walked over to sit with his back against the couch, stuck his nose up into the air and howled again, mellifluously. His face was so serious, his song so intent. We didn’t dare laugh too much. I think it was Skye who howled at a siren once, in his younger, more passionate days, surprising us into gales of laughter. I remember the look on his face – half surprise, half injury. He has never sung again, which is understandable. Would you feel any differently?

No, Sultan is the perfect dog for us in every way.

This is why he shouldn’t stay with us:

1. Ginna loves him.

— o —

I intend to watch Pollyanna tonight, in honor of the 4th. I am wondering if anybody on the face of the planet would understand why that makes sense? Probably not.

You know, I spent most of my kidhood in LA; here—I think of myself as kind of a small-town sorta guy, but now I think on it, I never have been that in all my life. LA. Kansas City. Suburbs of New York. Small city (now large) in Texas. But I’ve always believed in the home town America thing. Maybe because of Andy Griffith. But surely because of Pollyanna.

It was the town bazaar in the middle of the movie that grabbed me and set me down exactly where I wanted to live: all the town’s people, the home-grown booths and prizes, the folks you know, selling you fresh, hot corn on the cob. The feeling of community, and each person in it with his or her peculiar contribution to the magic. The closest I’ve ever gotten to that has been at church. And specifically, in LA when our ward (small congregation of about 200-600) held a thing like that for Pioneer Day, the LDS celebration of the day when the wagon trains finally entered the Salt Lake Valley.

Then the big tennis courts behind the chapel (why were there tennis courts? Nobody even played tennis there – must have been pre-existing) were filled with white tents, and people you only knew as grown ups suddenly became barkers and hair-dressers and photographers, offering you balls or rings to throw at gold fish bowls or big bottles or through hoops. There was even a dunking thing. Get your hair poofed up in the beauty tent. And there were prizes. It was tremendous. Glorious. None of the carny grit, but all of the community hilarity and well-metness you could ever dream of having.

That concept has stayed with me over the years. Social magic. And so, when my kids were old enough that I had some energy left to bank, I decided to make over that Pollyanna thing in my own yard. I invited people I loved from the neighborhood to bring their kids; we supplied the barbeque, they supplied the side dishes and the energy. And there were games. And prizes.

At first the games were just for the kids. Then I realized that I wanted kids and grown-ups together, so we had sack races (I had to find gunny sacks for that) and water games, and relays. I’d buy those packs of little flags on a toothpick things and hid them in the hard so the kids had to collect as many as they could find. I’d score one of those big-box bags of tootsie rolls (1000 in every bag!), and a huge box of gallon zip lock bags. Then we’d write the name of each kid invited on a bag – to be used for gathering the tiny flags, but more importantly, for storing the tootsie-toll points they’d win at every game. Including the name-every-state-and-president-game—during which parents cheated shamelessly, scoring tons of tootsies for their own blinking-with-ignorance kids.

So after the prayer and the eating (and how wonderful the eating was – so many potato, or pasta or frog eye salads, in every variation you can imagine – and the pies, always at least three or four kinds – and the ice cream treats (Good Humor man, move over) and the fishing (off the back deck with a real fishing pole – and nobody “sees” the big brother below the deck on the riverbank who is carefully pinching the plastic sea creatures with the clothes pin hook) – after all of that come the games – which used to take a good part of the afternoon. And then the counting of the tootsie rolls, the lining up in order – and the picking of the prizes (which is often surprising – and why did Caleb not choose the green pony??? Or Levi, either????)

It was pretty glorious.

Of course, for a child, glory comes pretty easily.

 

But we stopped doing all this a couple of years ago. The kids grown up, you know. And I got tired. And last time, only one family of friends came – and they wouldn’t leave the house because it was 106 degrees outside in the blaring, head-boring sun. So, for a while, no bunting in the back yard. No salads brought by friends more salad-imaginative than I. But no planning and large-scale cooking, either.

Still, this year, with a couple of our goodest buddies who were kind of stuck without family, on an insane impulse I decided to make a little one of those crazy celebrations again. Just a tiny one. Like borrowing kids for the day, just to remember what it was like to have them around and excited.

 

One family couldn’t come because they had guests and plans. But the rest of us did okay. I turned the games over to the eldest sons of two of those families, knowing these were guys I could gladly trust. And away we went.

It was really fun. These are kids who feel like family to me. And everybody behaved just pretty much the way crazy but very good kids behave. Like, I could be the proud grandmother-lion-tamer. And buy prizes at the dollar store (COOL prizes). And give out drum sticks and ice cream sandwiches like Lady Bountiful. We feasted on salads and burgers and topped it all off with Rachel’s killer flag cake and home made chocolate chip/fresh cherry ice cream. Can it get better than that?

Maybe your home town is just something you make. You collect it. You plant it. You water it and something grows out of all that. All I know is, maybe I’ll do it again next year.

Maybe.

 

 

 

In the beauty of the lilies . . .

Char and her StarGazers

 

Posted in Family, Just life, Memories and Ruminations | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

GBWYTWMA: concerning journeys

Posted on July 3, 2008 by K

 

Sometimes life gets a little . . . heavy.

        And the day finally was upon us. On its eve, much to my distress, I learned that packing with Cam had only been a preliminary packing. Not the real deal. That the real deal hadn’t been done, and the laundry had to be dried before we could even approach the concept of the real deal. Death bed sock searches. Did he buy twelve or thirteen of the swell, last you two years, let your feet breath black socks? Twelve pair we found. Question answered. Then, sadly, one more – not a pair, but a single sock. Silent witness of the fact that my house is still infested with at least one more of the dang things.

One comfort: on the very verge of our leaving the house the night before to transport Sultan and his gigantic dog carrier to the airlines, Gin and Kris decided not to take him. Things at the new house weren’t settled enough yet, and Kris had weeks of classes in the city. Reprieve. And to this day, Sultan’s brave, bouncing self joins our own two, jamming the way to the front door so that you can’t reach lock to key.

Trying out Sultan’s suit case.  After the fun, Sultan wasn’t sure he wanted to get into it ever again.

Dog jam

They kids played the last piano duets for a while. We hung out with Cam and L. And then we slept. Not sure how. It’s a combination of Christmas and Doom.

Next morning, an uncharacteristic breakfast of whole wheat pancakes with all the family denizens within a two block radius. All seven of us, counting Scoot, who ate no pancakes. And then he got dressed in his eternal Sunday go to meetin’s.

And we hefted the bags. And we drove to the MTC.

 

Elder Randle: three bags full

Checkin’ in the luggage

Hmmmm.  Wonder why there’s no picture of the mommy?

I gave out a lot of Kleenex there. Other mothers were tearing up all over. I was just tired.  We sat through the family meeting, heard some interesting stats about the place itself. And then – poof – time to go.

Murphy stood up. We stood up. He was like a fine horse at the race gate. We were like – ummm. Lumps? Gigantic hugs. Last best wishes and loves. And as he walked away, two years rose up between us like a shimmering mist. He turned back, so much love in his face. And then he was gone to his work, his wonderful, glorious, selfless work.

And we went home. To irrigate.

I do not take pictures of irrigation. It’s not pretty. You have to get grease and dirt all over you, and you have to really, really work on being a good person, because you find other people’s gates carelessly left open, or unexpectedly left closed. And then you either get way more water than you counted on, or way less.

But that was over in a hectic couple of hours. I dream at night of gigantic, acre covering non-horse-threatening sprinklers.

And then, up sprang family. New family. Not new so much as not usually here family. Guy’s cousin’s gorgeous, wonderful, delightful wife, Kellie, and her coolest ever mom made their first ever visit to our fair state, toting a daughter who they’d enrolled in a clogging camp at the university.

Oh, my gosh – it was almost like reading Dickens. They loved the valley, they loved BYU, they loved the people. I started squinting at things, looking for wings on the backs of people and halos hovering in the air. “Why didn’t we MOVE here?” Kellie said gleefully. So we spent the next two days, Chaz and I, trying to convince her that they should.

We showed them the house (“I’ve seen pictures of this house!”), the horses (which were gratifyingly admired), the river path (which didn’t work out so swell because of the mosquitoes). We took her to the mountains, showed her our favorite spots, like the stone theater above Aspen Grove, explored the art shack at Sundance (which I had only heard about) where we saw a man fish a hank of glowing molten glass out of a white hot furnace with a stick – and right there in front of us, in a matter of maybe 50 seconds, turn it into a lily. We went back and toured our own backyard, presenting our river as if we’d made it ourselves, and then shared more of the secrets of the house (including Guy’s Fabulous Bread Recipe).

That night, we had dinner at Gigi’s gorgeous place, and I will not tell you about how they’d just finished their huge basement, and how I almost sat on the floor and cried when I saw the new bathroom down there. But I will tell you about the good conversation and chicken and cousins who showed up.

Next day, Gigi joined us – no. She actually took us all up to Temple Square and we spent the morning looking at everything and having dinner on the terrace of the JS building – gorgeous, gorgeous, delicious. We had a fabulous time. Thinking back on it, I can almost feel that fabulousness all over again. Kellie and Jackie were like a total shot of B1—they sucked up our sorrows, made us feel like something rare and were generally balm in Gilead. If I could bottle Kellie up, I’d spray her on my mirror, and never be afraid of it again. I think – I think she was a kind of dear angel, actually. Sent to deliver.

If we want pictures of this outing, we’ll have to wait for the BLOG Kellie is promising to put together. 

Saturday, we showed Kellie (in her last hour here) our last treasure: the family lunch at Burger Supreme. But just before that, my sister called out of the blue. She was here. Here from Texas. Here to drop off her youngest child at BYU for the summer. It was like a family tag-team. So we went to Burgers with Kellie and her mom, introduced her to Abdel (possibly the sweetest man on earth) and double bacon cheeseburgers. Then came home and I met my Kev for lunch (I didn’t eat at burgers – just so you know), and that turned into my brother and wife coming down for the evening and making a party of it.

Kind of like keeping balloons in the air – they never let us touch the ground for three whole days. And then church was great. Better than usual. Wonderful.

And after that: life.

Which has NOT turned out to be a sudden freedom to do anything I want whenever I want, though I keep waiting for the waters to part, and the golden paved road of empty nest heaven to open before me.

The problem is, I had this blog to finish, and a horse to de-silver, another irrigation, some deep research into why I lose metadata when I save .jpeg to .png—bills, appointments, business put off. And I’m planning a 4th of July bash with our friends.

You see? I do it to myself.

“Pony” yet to be de-silvered

But here is the end, or beginning, actually, of Murphy’s tale: we have gotten two letters and three emails, and one phone call (to tell us that his visa is delayed, which is no surprise). And I have bought him three more pair of socks (just in case), three more sketch books (just for fun), three more t-shirts (just for p-day) and a water filtering bottle (just for dysentery, or whatever you might get when you’re in the wild, which he might end up being, but we don’t know yet, because he isn’t there yet because he doesn’t have a visa.

Ta-da.

 

Oh, here it is.  She’s safe when she’s fussing.  But don’t tell her I put this one up – she looks so old and flappy.

 

gbwytwma: translation: God be with you till we meet again . . . which we may not sing in church again for a long time.

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