kstreetjournal | A pony a day keeps the money away —

There be Eagles here

Posted on March 31, 2008 by K

March 30, 2008

Yesterday, M and his near-brother, Brennan, received their Eagle Scout awards. Brennan’s mom, who is as close to blood sister to me as you can get without the blood part—and scout advancement chairman in the ward—set this whole wonderful thing up in my backyard. Neither of us stand on too much ceremony. We put an announcement in the ward bulletin, and M sent out Facebook invites, but we really hadn’t expected much of a turn-out. Especially seeing as it was supposed to be cold and stormy. And on a Saturday morning.

Setting out the spread

The two Eagle men

But danged if we didn’t have a billion people show up. My brother and his wife, all the youth leaders, friends, neighbors – beloved friends, neighbors—and the third of our almost sisterhood, Geneva the horse maven. Rachel had bought enough Costco sugar to feed an army, and good thing, too. And it was forty five degrees, which doesn’t sound that bad, except you’ve got to factor in the wind, which was blowing, and the clouds, which were lowering. We were all freezing. But it was still swell as anything, which is what happens when you have honorable young men and a yard full of people who know and love them.

The goofy, beloved brother and his lovely, patient wife.

The goofy brother. No other comment.

Fam visiting with fam. The lovely and spunky L

Three women of the apocalypse ——— and two angels, Mr. Stone and Kirsten

Hero brother and The Great T

Color guard – brothers of the Eagle man

One billion people, listening to Rachel

Dad, awarding the Eagle to his son. Mother, pinned and proud

And the other Eagle. Gee, is his mom proud too?

The very best part for me was C’s tribute to his brother. You know, you carry these babies for it seems like years, and you pour your life first into birthing them (do not try this at home) and then into raising them—and one day, you find yourself standing on the sidelines, watching one kid (who you love, respect and admire) giving a man’s solemn and tearful tribute to another of your kids (who you love, respect and admire) and the pain and the wonder and the amazement simply hold you silent.

It worked. Somehow, the whole family thing worked.

The beautiful brother, one of my heros.

So here are some pictures. We didn’t take video, and maybe that’s right – maybe all this kinda stuff should only be stored in memory. Still, if it were possible to hear C’s words again, andM’s – later in the program, I’d finally buy an iPod and wear it like water-wings.

Later, Geneva met me at my pasture and taught me a thing or two over about an hour and a half—most of which I remembered as I practiced on my own for another hour and a half. And the upshot of all this is that the chocolate cake and key lime cheesecake I had for breakfast at the scout thing has me feeling fairly bulgy today, and the hours I spent in what I thought was the weak sun of March broiled me like a lobster.

Thus on the heels of the sublime, a boat-load of ridiculous.

Posted in Family, Just life | Tagged Eagles, friends, Sons, spring | 5 Comments

Stage Door Tales

Posted on March 30, 2008 by K

March 27, 2008

Last week, the great Ed Catmull came to BYU to open the new BYU Center for Animation, a collaborative effort of the Engineering and Computing, Math and Something and Fine Arts colleges. Mr. Catmull is the president of Pixar, and also, incidentally, of Disney Animation. M saved me a seat. When he left the house, and he left early, I tried to explain to him how to weasel his way via hidden paths into the DeJong concert hall, in case they hadn’t opened the house by the time he’d gotten there. This is an arcane bit of knowledge not had many. Only us drama and vocal performance majors who have lived years in the basement of that building know the odd byways and accesses.

Mr. Catmull’s speech was more than interesting; as M is aimed straight at Pixar, I was interested to hear the man say that the most important aspect of building a creative institution that can last the day is finding great people and building functional teams. The company, it seems, has found valuing people its core concern. And of course, when you see Pixar movies you realize that every one of them speaks of the human journey and connection.

But the best part of the experience was the incredibly odd end part: M said, “Now, show me these secret ways into this place.” So I did, and found myself plunged into an old and forgotten life.

Three solid years (including summers) of my life as a student had centered on that building. I had spent several semesters working in the basement costume shop (to my mother’s chagrin; she never wanted us to have to work in college). In fact, I was in there sewing my heart out the day of my own graduation, which I had not deigned to attend. I met the man who would some day be our long-time studio piano tuner down in the piano lab (that’s an old friendship) next door down from that costume shop. I knew back dim stairways, hidden green rooms, arcane hallways the way you know your own house in full daylight. I taught labs in the Fine Arts photo lab when it was down there. I sang and danced in the echoing subterranean halls. I snuck into the organ practice rooms to play Bach (badly). Later, I taught a freshman English class in one of the make-up rooms off the tunnel.

Okay, so in the spirit of things, I have hunted up the five or so shots taken of me

during my college years. Here, I am a freshman in a little fake Wilkensen Center French Cafe.

It was more than a stomping ground; for me, for so many years, the place was home, business, social life – everything. So I was more than glad to lead Murphy and friends into the labyrinth. At first, things went very well—I showed them the back staircase, the staging area off the side of the huge DeJong stage, the hallway below that lead to the costume shop. We explored the DeJong green room; the girls followed me into the women’s room where there are make-up mirrors and lockers and showers, and where, or so legend has it, the occasional odd insider, behind-the-scenes student will secretly live for months at a time.

In front of my dorm with Dad and goofy family friends.

I told them about the orchestra pit – showed them the door you must never open, for fear of a terrible, squishing death – through it is the space under (or over, depending) the hydraulic pit floor – and while I was explaining it, the crew upstairs raised the floor right before our very eyes.

I was mysterious and romantic—a phantom of the opera, trailing M and his three female friends along in the shadow of my unfurling (and figurative) cloak.

Until I got lost.

I never, ever thought I could get lost down there. But I swear they’ve changed the halls around. The photo lab isn’t there anymore. But I KNOW the Pardoe green room still is, and I couldn’t find it for anything. I led the kids around and aoround – past the black box theater doors, past the off stage door for the Nelke experimental – but could not for the life of me find the one stage I’d spent the most time on.

I remember years ago, showing my parents, or G – I don’t remember who – around the tunnel. We got down to the end and walked into the backstage of the Pardoe. I knew every inch of the place. And I was showing it off like it was mine, when this stage hand walks up and says, “Sorry folks. Authorized people only back here.” And I was left just shy of saying, “Listen sonny—and who the heck are YOU?” But you really can’t have it both ways; I’d turned my back on that whole theater thing long before – before graduate school, really. It hadn’t been right for me.

Here with HR Puffenstuff at my place of summer employment.

I made the dress. What there is of it.

Me, in summer Shakespeare – about 1974

With the future bro-in-law 1974

Note the wand-slender youth. Me. That was me.

I do have this one marvelous story from those days: once, when I was a costume girl, the music department was staging Die Fledermaus. I think it was that one. Where we usually did all the costumes from the ground up, this production was huge and called for a massive number of fancy-dress period costumes. So we measured each one of the massive cast and sent off to Eve’s of New York for the costumes. Job done. Except, along came opening night, and the costumes hadn’t come. Suddenly, we were in panic mode – the costumer went through the back room, pulling anything and everything with a full skirt and the remotest similarity to the period of the show off the racks. The entire staff dumped classes, sleeping, food and disappeared in a flurry of alterations and improvisation—thread, fabric, scissors flying everywhere, industrial machines running like trains.

To me it was given to make the romantic lead’s second act opener – a blue dress, as I recall, and one that I sewed like the wind. I cut the thing out before the show had started, slammed the parts together, gathering waste and sleeves, all business while the first act was being played out somewhere over our heads. At intermission, the ingénue came down to us, and we threw the dress over her head, making last minute adjustments. The only thing missing? The back closure. No zipper. No buttons. So I pulled console through an emphatic needle and started to sew her into the dress.

We ran out of time.

Down the hallway she hurried, pulling me along by dent of the thread, and I was stitching on the very hoof. Up one flight of the back stairs – music swelling up above – up another, closing the back of the dress stitch by stitch as we went. Through the door onto the wings of the stage, and then right into the teasers I followed her – and snipped the thread in the very moment she stepped out into the spotlight and began to sing.

I hung there for just a second, poised between utter shadow and colored spot lights—regained my balance, stepped back. I had seen faces in the front row of the audience.

Through all of this, I had drawn no blood.

Note again—> the quizzical look.

Still got that one.

Posted in Just life, Memories and Ruminations | Tagged old times, Pixar, Sons | 6 Comments

Why the Chinese Prize Sons

Posted on March 25, 2008 by K

Though we have run dry of Easter egg hunters, we have no shortage of people who eat breakfast. And while the eggs we peeled for Easter morning were only white as snow and brown as earth, they tasted just like the colored variety.

Saturday breakfast was always a big deal in my mother’s house: pancakes. Sometimes (oh, please, please) waffles. My father helped in the making of these things, and it was a fine way to start out the weekend, let me tell you. My mom used to make her own syrup out of boiled, caramelized brown sugar and Mapeline. I still love pancakes, even though the simple sight of them invariably puts my present wardrobe out of reach.

But (aside from waffles), the speciallest breakfast of all was something my mom called “Eggs Vermacella.” Weird name. Funny that I—armchair etymologist that I am—never questioned it. You just have to figure, some great chef—Francois Vermacella—came up with the dish and named it after himself?

It was something my mother’s mother had made for breakfast, way back in the day (I think – I think I remember Mom telling me that), and when I was a kid, we only had it once in a blue moon.

A work-intensive dish. You take boiled eggs, peel them, save the great yellow globes from inside, cut up the whites into medium small bits. Then you make a white sauce (I have Mom’s recipe for white sauce, but I tend to get fancy and capricious with these things, so they never turn out the same way twice), and add the bits of egg white to the sauce. This is served over toast – toast, egg sauce, then the yellows, very finely grated over the top. Fabulous. In our own version here, we add other things – a little garlic, then bacon and shredded cheese on top. And we only make it on Easter morning.

Some years ago, as I was – for some inexplicable reason – thumbing through the Betty Crocker cookbook Mom gave me on the occasion of my wedding (the only cook book I really use; I’ve opened it at least twenty five times). In it, I stumbled across this very recipe. It was kind of a shock, like suddenly running into a celebrity or finally discovering a picture of an ancestor: a huge, full color, layout shot of this dish with the words “Eggs vers Marseilles” printed under it in some curly, fancy font.

Hmmmmm.

My grandmother was from Alabama. Evidently, they don’t speak French there.

It does make you wonder how many other good old family traditions are just slightly skewed truths?

So here is a picture of our Easter Feast. We still call it Eggs Vermacella, but now we are very fond of the name for its own sake. This is not a very good picture. I forgot about how I’m blogging the Significant Moments until Guy had already mixed up the toppings and I’d eaten half of mine.

So there you go.

I have now posted a recipe. Sort of.

But that was not what I meant to do when I sat down to write this – thus the title of the piece. Oh, and I have decided to name this column “Singing in the Barn” because I do that a lot, and can’t help but think of it as a metaphor for my life. “Kstreetjournal,” which was Murphy’s idea, is the publication masthead title. “Singin’” is the column. See?

Oh – and before I actually get started with the real subject, here’s something else, a thought I had this morning as I was shoveling up material with my apple-picker, which is what nice horse people call the manure rake: here is an interesting juxtaposition of words: wont and want. “Wont” means “way,” as in, “That’s just his way.” More than habit, really. Sort of – just the way you are, the way you go about things.

“Want” can mean a couple of things. One of them suggests need –“they were in want of.” Meaning they had a deficit and a need. I suppose, to accurately define the breadth of this word, you’d have to somehow communicate a whole class of feeling in all its gradient—everything from roaring lust through hankering and coveting into the cravings of starvation—with a whole center section that is characterized by selfishness and short term thinking. Which is what brought me to this interplay:

Being in want is pretty much always simply a product of wont, which is driven by wanting.

And I wonder if maybe these were the same word in the beginning. And who made up that word, anyway? Someone who walked by a window in the Shambles of York, saw some fruit buns in the window of that wonderful, marvelous little bakery just near where the purple paint man sets up his statue base (yes, I know you have no idea what I’m talking about) and, looking at those lovely fat buns, feeling the stirring in the soul that grips you at the first glimpse of them, suddenly had pop into his mind the following string of letters: W-A-N-T. It’s close in sound to WAAAAAA – which is sometimes the way we write the sounds a baby makes when he’s feeling that very same (if less refined and tuned) feeling.

I don’t know.

But here: on to the topic of the day—

Why the Chinese Prize Sons

Saturday, March whatever in the year of our Lord 2008.

G: in Kansas City with the oldest daughter and her brood (including one chick and a large dog. I am not including the husband as brood).

Chaz: in Japan, with her good friend who managed to leave her rail pass, passport and wallet on the trail they took from the airport to the hotel.

M: home with me. (YAY!)

C&L: running their Home Owner Association’s Easter egg hunt, and busily waiting for The Kid to spring forth.

Problem: it’s March and the weather is getting unseasonably warm. I have an acre and a little over a quarter of pasture that, though the horses have been shut off it for a month now, is smothering in a winter’s worth of horse by-products. And the grass is beginning to grow. Or trying to, at any rate.

This is a big deal. It may not sound like much to ya’ll, but without that grass, I have nothing to feed some 5000 pounds of pet. And you’re really supposed to have two acres per horse in order to have feed even just for the summer. I am a small pasture person. This means, I have to farm smart.

And I do. I picked up ideas back in the beginning, and I have kept five horses fat and alive all late spring through summer into late fall on that tiny bit of ground. I do it by dividing the length of the field up with electric fence: seven tiny pastures that I graze my guys on, 10 days per pasture – giving each small segment of grass over a month to recover from the last grazing.

Amazing. It works. There’s work setting it up the fences. But once you’ve done that, the process is fairly easy—you just have to keep your eye on the grass all summer. And there’s trying to plan things so that the horses are far from the road frontage at times like the 4^th of July (when people who drive by can do unspeakably stupid things).

I do have to drag the field. I try to do it twice a year – spring and late summer. And this is why: horses put out a lot of byproduct. And they tend to choose one area where they live and use that over and over until the grass is buried there and burned (chemical burn). So we have to fire up the Suburban, hook up the rigid toothed harrow and a few other bells and whistles, and drive the whole assembly up and down and over and under and around and around that field until we’ve pulverized every horse apple on it and spread it as fertilizer over the whole thing.

I’d love to be able to do this myself. But I can’t. This is why I’ve included these pictures (this plus the fact that showing off my darling kids needs only the flimsiest excuse) – so you can see my harrow (I own a harrow) – which I bought used. Very used. Weighs a ton, flops around and can kill you if you happen to trip and fall on it. I can’t begin to lift the sections alone. Heck, I don’t even dare try to disentangle the two parts, which are stored Tee-pee-like in a space behind the horse trailer. You need dead weight to do the job when you drag.

So I needed my sons.

This is not to suggest that my sons are dead weight. In fact, they are my heroes. My L. gave up her C for a bit of the morning. I was already down at the barn, messing with manure (you’d surprised how useful the stuff can be) and raking out the places the harrow can’t reach. My phone died there, but I had faith my sons would show – as they soon did, one in his green truck, one in my Mighty Suburban.

And we had a great time. I can’t think of two people in the world I’d rather work with – funny, focused, strong and competent, and they take my direction without mutiny. They pulled apart the tee-pee of spikes, carried it over, hooked it up, while I went into the barn and dug that sweet little seventy pound grid they’re fastening on as a tail there – out from under about a hundred pounds of tiny gravel. I’m stiff today, three days later, after muscling that thing out of the ground; but then, when you are in the company of giants, you have to do great things.

M drove the Monster car – they love this, zooming around all that space, tearing up grass, air, silence at about seventy miles an hour – that clacking, smacking, moaning assembly bouncing along behind them, decimating months of manure and feeding and aerating the grass in the process. Try that on your ride-on mower. M finally slowed down long enough to offer C a chance to drive, but the older brother waved him on. “I’ve been eighteen already,” he said to me, grinning.

The best part came after we’d finished the field. Now we had to drag the arena, which meant we had to chase the horses out into the field. This is not hard to do. Horses who have been penned up in even a large arena for a month – and who dream at night of field and grass and wide open spaces – add a little spring breeze to this – horses like this, I say, are like a force of nature.

C with his HD camera, and I with my digital still—we readied ourselves, choosing good angles, as M got those horses all het up and excited, finally running over to throw open the very back gate. Horses at attention, blinking, unbelieving. Horses looking at each other, like—“Are they kidding?” Horses, beginning to travel – fast, then faster, in case somebody should realize that gate was actually wide open.

Horses shooting through the gate.

My little red horse. Zion.

The baby, known as Hickory or Tiger or Getouta There – supposed to be a pony. Surprise!!

Sophie, flying foward.

Then, oh, the dancing and posturing and acrobatics – tails high, noses in the air, manes flying – the turns and jumps, the fake fighting, the digging in of those sharp hooves and the flex and launch from that massive machine that powers them from behind.

Up and down the field they tore, and we made M chase them, keep their blood up, while we took pictures the best we could. I had the wrong lens on, really – and couldn’t keep up with the focus – honestly, it all happened so fast, every moment, so fast. Such power, such joy, such glory and rejoicing.

Tiger, coming right at me. Are you impressed with my confidence? Stupidity?

Zion on a banked turn. Imagine being on his back – I’ve actually ridden this! Like flying.

Zion, racing the lovely captive Arabian neighbors

Jetta, an old barrel racer: the old girl’s still got it. Tiger. And the fine and magnificent Dustin.

The Arabians give up. They will race me and the fertilizer spreader presently.

Just for fun – a dash back into the arena – and then out again.

Finally, they wound down. And while they were out there, trying to scare up a real blade of grass in all that brown (which gives the phrase Easter egg hunt some real meaning), we shut the gates on them and dragged the arena – this time, using C’s truck. Thus, we put to bed worries I’d had for months – how was I going to get this done? Especially with G gone. Before the rains, when the field is all mud. But here came my sons to the rescue, and a looming task is now nothing but a great memory.

M and apple picker. Or maybe that’s the rake. C’s turn to raise some dust.

Portrait of man and boy.

The boys went off to do their own things—C to his young wife, M to the animation studio—while I stayed to fertilize my 60,000 square feet, galvanizing the beautiful bay Arabian horses next door (who love to play frightened and make a big party out of it). Another major spring event, laid to rest.

I like Saturdays like that—where you’re all together, and you work your head off and you get dirty enough, washing your hands actually makes a visible difference. And then you’re finished, and you’ve changed something, started something big—a different kind of work than the vacuuming/paying your bills/cleaning out the dishwasher stuff that is the structure of our lives. I like having finished something. And after I finish, I like being invited to my son-and-daughter’s house to dye eggs and laugh and feel like a person who has actually done something with her day.

Now G is back (after an eight hour journey) and events are rolling on. Chaz will be gone another two weeks (assuming that the fraud alert company doesn’t freak out because her visa’s being charged in Japan and shut off her card, in which case she will have to work her way home on a slow steamer). And soon L’s baby will come, and so will Gin and the baby and Sultan. There’s still stuff to do. And horses to train.

But Saturday, I had sons. And now my pasture is ready to face the summer.

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations, Family, Images of our herd in specific, Just life | Tagged Horses, joy, manure, Sons, spring, work | 8 Comments

The Future Calling . . .

Posted on March 14, 2008 by K

March 12, 2008:

after 5:30

Which is the time we told everybody to be here for the opening of the CALL. So five-thirty came – and so did Luke and Mirium, two of M’s best friends. But where was the M, himself? Five thirty five: CR is here, home from work. Luke is still wearing his choir tux. CM and LR have rolled in, and G has sent his studio session home. We’re all here.

And finally comes M. He’s beaming like the sun. He sits on the couch, waiting for everybody to connect (cell phone) with other important people – Corinne up in Idaho, our Gin, out in the mid-west.

Then he holds the big envelope in his hands and begins to open it, the same way we always open Christmas presents: carefully, reverently—don’t rip the paper. But this is only an envelope, and we all lean in, willing him to get tough with it. Inch by inch, he lifts the flap. And then carefully slides out the letter packet. And begins to read.

He holds my next two years’ fate in my hands.

“Dear Brother,” he reads. Then, “June 18^th.” And then, finally, “Buenos Aires , Argentina, South mission,” and the entire room erupts in cheers.

I finally know where one full fourth of my heart will be for the next two years.

And since then, the information has streamed in—pictures of Argentina, shining praise from Argentinean returned missionaries. And I ascertain that the place is four hours ahead of us, which somehow helps me orient myself. And our friend, Camilla’s joy, connecting our M with South America, her own beloved home.

I know I should sound delighted. And in very real ways, I am. To have such sons and daughters—how could I not be delighted?

Posted in Family, Just life | Tagged call, LDS, Missions, motherhood | 5 Comments

The Cost of Moving on –

Posted on March 14, 2008 by K

I don’t know how many people will understand this. I have been mocked before for waxing sentimental about my children. I wasn’t really that interested in having any in the first place, you know. Oh, I was into the concept—but my babysitting experience hadn’t left me deliriously happy at the thought of actually having to live with children – little children – full time. Nothing had prepared me for the kind of connection I found with Gin—oh, it took me some days before I could translate the little lump of sleeping baby into what she actually was. But once I figured it out, my heart was lost forever. “I’m so in love with this baby,” my friend, Meridee, said, each time she had one. And yes, I was so in love with those babies.

Not with babies in general, understand. With my babies.

I had planned to put the “nursery” waaaay down the hall so that no crying babies would bother my sleep. Instead, we slept them in our room for the first many months, first in the borrowed white and yellow bassinet. Then in the crib. I was terrified of SIDS. So, for several months, I’d sleep so that I could reach out and touch a baby in the night, just to make sure. This is how I know that tiny babies dream, and that they have a sense of humor. Because they used to wake me, laughing in their sleep.

The day we’d finally move one out into his or her real bedroom was always a tough one for me. Every day back then was tough—like I got a new baby each day, and lost the old one, they changed so fast; the little heartbreakingly charming things they’d done for days, suddenly dropped for other, equally heartbreaking things. We tried to catch all of it on film—each passing baby. Maybe we did catch some of it—but even at that time, what made it to film or video was a thin likeness of the original.

When the day came for us to move Murphy’s crib out, I did it myself. Knew it was time. Dismantled the thing screw by screw, fall the time iercely silent, literally grieving. He was the last of them. This was a door closed. I grieved for three days, and then I got on with things. In the end, you always have to get on with things. But I still remember it, that feeling that something was gone.

Today, there is an envelope, presented in state on a glass platter, on the tidy dining room table, waiting for Murphy to come home. It’s a glorious, large envelope, simple and white, with a Salt Lake post mark. I have not opened it. I have not even been tempted to open it. It is his mission call.

It’s the last of the last. In it is folded my fate for the next two years. A target for my fledgling’s first real solo. The mark between what has been a beautiful and deeply engrossing life—and the rest of my life.

Today, Murphy becomes a man.

“Isn’t this exciting?” dear friends say. And, of course, it is. It is. But it is also painful. I know my faith by the way I am not pulling my hair, running around the house, keening—by the way I am willing to abide by what’s written inside. The problem with raising children to be your friends is that they are a changeable feast. Glorious while you have it, all the more smarting at the loss of it. He is at the point where he can’t go home again (thank you, Mr. Wolf); hs own life has started.

I would wear them all like wallpaper, these kids, these friends of my heart. Like air in my face. Taken for granted as eternal. Laughter in the air like morning light. Popping, glorious synergy.

Sad and glorious. How odd life is.

Posted in Family, Just life, Memories and Ruminations | Tagged kids, LDS, Missions, motherhood | 6 Comments

Who was it said, “Life is like a quilt -“?

Posted on February 21, 2008 by K

February 11, 2008

Actually, I think it was probably me.

I have not been living well these days—even aside from the fact that I never really eat the way I should. Or exercise the way I should. Or go to bed when I should. Lately, I have been even worse at all of that and more.

The staples of my day are pretty much still in place: get up, stumble downstairs, drive out to the horses, do the treadmill for 40 minutes. Which all sounds commendable, right? And, it is—as long as breakfast doesn’t happen till after noon because I didn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m. first waiting up for Murphy, then fretting about life, and then tried to make up for it by sleeping later than any responsible adult should. (Isn’t it sad that you can’t just say “adult” and trust the word to convey “responsibility” all on its own?)

And as long as the day doesn’t go downhill from there.

I’m not sure that being actively creative and working on family history could actually be termed “going downhill.” But I suspect that spending eight hours planted in front of my desktop computer, playing with Photoshop and practically living on Orbit sweet mint gum is not exactly the gateway to health and size four jeans.

Because that’s what I’ve been doing—four weeks, no – maybe six weeks, finally, finally, finally working to check off one of those permanent line items on my “to do” list: photo books.

Ironically bad shot of several books plus aging Valentine’s roses

Digression:

This little entry wants so badly to play out to its organic ends, which I promise I will allow it to do in later installments (iphoto books vs. Blurb, for instance), but I have to interrupt my photo-tome to talk about the other things that have lately been the fabric of our lives – namely: fabric. And teeth, the removal of. This interruption brought to you by February 20^th and another late waiting up for the M – whose afore mentioned teeth were the ones dragged into the light.

Oh, and Em’s bracelet. I’ve had that on the to-do list, too. This is my yard-raking little beauty across the street. I had these wonderful tiny red heart beads (I love beads. I would have sold California for a pound of good lampwork) and I wanted to make something out of them. So I went to the craftstore and found – cute, cute (sorry guys) silvery chain and little heart closers. So I decided to make somebody a Valentine’s bracelet, and the only person I knew who would wear such a thing was Em. So I took silvery wire and spent a few hours bending spirals and reinforcing jump rings, and it pleased me very much, and I think it pleased her, too. Check off: use beads, do a good deed, put the heart beads to work, make something for Valentine’s day. Add: encourage children to have at least one female offspring.

M’s Teeth:

Seems you cannot go on a mission with extra teeth. Maybe those wisdom dents are actually the opposite of what they are called; maybe they weaken your spiritual powers (just kidding).

Phone self portrait. M without retainer-and-teeth, definitely under the influence –

Phone self portrait #2: recovery. Anesthesia out of the system, leaving goofiness behind. Also, my new couch.

Phone self portrait #3: Swelled head. Jaw, I mean.

And yet they still come to see him. And good ones, too, as you can see –

Anyway, here is a picture of the M, drugged and happy in the surgeon’s chair. This darn dental meister wouldn’t allow me to stay in the operatory during the procedure, evidently afraid that I might just get giddy and put yet another head-sized hole in his wall (seems that’s happened before). I tried to tell him that I’ve assisted on this kind of surgery before, which is true, and that I’ve witnessed horse castrations without a flutter, which is also true. He said, “It’s different when it’s your own kid.” And I can see that witnessing the castration of one of my kids might, indeed, upset me.

We made up for my banishment by spending the next three days in a Lord of the Rings marathon (G. included – which is odd, considering the disregard in which he generally holds TV, and especially TV during daylight hours). This little mental vacation, however, was somewhat complicated by The Dress.

Story of The Dress:

My d-i-l, the lovely Mz. L, hard as she has fought it, is finally showing her pregnancy. She has been doing everything in the world to avoid having to wear stodgy, expandable clothes. But there is a point when every healthy sized woman (over size 1) loses the fight, and L has come to that sad pass. What’s worse, the one formal event of her year was coming up – a night on which she and C traditionally become the Cutest Couple Ever, and L is the a princess. Feeling more barge than beauty, she went searching for a formal gown that would make her lovely – and had no luck at all.

Springs to the rescue, s-i-l, the costumer, who jumped on line and searched out the One Good Pregnant Pattern on the Planet. “I’ll make it for you!” she announced. Which really meant that we would make it, considering that she is a working minion and we only had half a week in which to work this miracle. So the costumer and I set off to the fabric store – two fabric stores in the end – and had a great time sorting through prospective fabrics, ribbons, closures, trims, and threads. We bought twice as much fabric as we meant to, which is what you end up with when you can’t decide which fabric to use as the sweeping skirt, and so decide to use both, one over-laying the other.

Black slightly stretchy crepe—very nice to sew on. Wonderful weird gold and black stretchy – something – also surprisingly easy to sew with. Then the cutting and the thinking and pinning and fudging (and the going to buy more because we didn’t have enough), the flurry of sewing and fitting – and at every turn, a new design idea. While Frodo was finding his way through Mordor, I hand stitched the sleeve hems. Just like that scene in Disney’s Cinderella, we were the birds, draping ribbons, and the mice, tacking on the extra trims (did the mice do that?). And L had to get down from her fitting stool at least twice, due to slight pregnant lady vertigo.

The costumer at work. Remember that story about the shoemaker’s elves who had no clothes for themselves? Good thing I am behind the camera.

Costumer sewing: sew like the wind, costumer!!!!

Pre-vertigo L, already lovely; about to be lovelier.

In the middle of the fitting. See the crepe? See the gold overskirt? See the ribbon? See the wonderful girl who I love, being fitted by another girl I love?

We finished the dress before Middle-Earth had been freed of the Ring and about fifteen minutes before L had to leave for the Event. But the dress was a smashing success, and made L feel as lovely as she actually is. Or so she kindly tells us. All joy.

Princess with closed eyes.

Princess with dog.

Princess with costumer and dogs. Costumer’s assistant behind camera. Staff about to collapse on the floor in rags.

So it was kind of a weird weekend. The best part of this for me was that suddenly, all of us were hanging around the same room for three days, working together, watching together, fetching meds and ice cream for M together. I am pretty greedy for these moments, and more than willing to a handle what it costs me to own them.

Finale: The COSTUMER AT HOME. And in Dang Good Shape.

Too many pictures, huh?

Posted in Family, Just life | Tagged beads, bracelet, costumer, photo books, sewing, Teeth, The Dress, Valentine's | 10 Comments

The weight of a life –

Posted on February 12, 2008 by K

Beginning of February in the impossible year, 2008

The morning after President Hinckley died, my closet rod came down. Just now, I’m sorry I took no pictures of this, but at the time, it wasn’t something I was ever really going to want to relive. Happened very first thing—I got up, stumbled into the bathroom, and wasn’t in there two minutes when I heard this sound, like somebody had just released the lock, retracting some absolutely huge metal measuring tape.

I had no other referent for that sound whatsoever. So of course, I wondered if Guy was on the roof. In the snowstorm, on the roof, measuring something with a gigantic metal measuring tape. And hard on the heels of that, came visions of Guy falling off said frozen roof, and thereby accidentally releasing the catch on the gigantic metal measuring tape.

At the break of dawn. Or maybe it was about eight thirty.

It takes me a while to come fully awake. Actually, it doesn’t happen till I’ve done the treadmill. Which probably means I should stop going straight from bed to the car to the barn. I don’t have to go far to feed the horses, straight down Center Street—and I’m fully confident about heading down there in my pajamas—but now that I think of it, driving with your eyes half-closed is never that smart. Especially when there’s a school crossing involved.

Shockingly ugly, sleepy mother, on her way to the car. She does not sleep in the boots. Actually, these are not her jimmies; more like her exercise clothes.

Anyway, it wasn’t until I dodged into the closet to find my running shoes that I realized what had happened: I had been visited with a metaphor for my life. The first thing that flashed before my eyes was the magnitude of the job I now had before me: finding my shoes under several hundred pounds of wool and cotton. And then, of course, there was the clean-up.

This is my closet rod. It was Guy’s in the beginning, with two layers. I stole it from him.

If I were a sensible person, the rod probably wouldn’t have come down in the first place. But I am more like a geological phenomenon—mother Earth and I both collect layers. It is exactly the opposite of a rolling stone, which is funny, because what else is the planet really, when you think about it? And it’s not like there’s a lot of dust to collect in the great vacuum of space. Or maybe there is. Which would explain my house.

You know the way people will come along and write “Wash Me” with their finger across the sad surface of a dirty car? My father did that once across the lid of my ancient baby grand piano. I think it is unfair that, even if you are not doing anything wrong, and are, in fact, doing many things right, dust can just come along and finally, force a crisis. In your house. Your private inner sanctums. The only place where this evidently cannot happen is usually populated by people in white space suits and really clean gloves. Or maybe in my sister-in-law’s house, but it’s hard to tell; she has a maid.

I dust. I do it regularly, at least once a season. Sometimes more. It depends on what else I’m doing in life, because the truth is, I pretty much exist in motion. You have to hold still to see dust. For me, holding still is a matter of standing on the brakes and the gas at the same time.

Dust. I have kind of swept some of it up into bunnies to demonstrate my negligence all the more dramatically.

So here is this closet rod, exposing to me the follies of my life, prime among them, the irrepressible belief that someday, I’m going to lose the weight. This is why I still keep clothes I wore twenty years ago. It has something to do with remembering what if felt like to wear them, way back when I was young. Are my eyes fully open yet? No, or I would notice that the clothes should have been buried with the eighties (that’s ‘8os), especially the ones with waistbands. Or maybe with the nineties. But not only am I sure that someday, button may yet again meet buttonhole, but that FASHION WILL CYCLE.

What president of the church admonished us never to waste anything? Was he talking to women who have weak closet rods? Perfectly serviceable tuxedo shirt/blouses should not just be cast off. Fake-paper-bag-waisted skirts can be altered. Dresses I do not want to wear anymore may suddenly grow new charm. And I know I’m going to find something, someday, to wear with my broomstick skirts—that’s a shoo-in; I’m an author, even if I’m not from Arizona.

The problem is facing the truth. I hang on to things. I can’t shake something out sternly, exercising my otherwise critical eye and say, “You – with all your past associations and really cute little flower pattern, and potential for—something—you are banished.” Because what else might I be throwing out? On a pragmatic level, when the harsh and heartless mood is on me and the dust flies out my windows, I do tend to go over-board. I lost my grandfather’s ancient gold cufflink (made into a necklace for me by my father, and worn every day for five years) when I—in an insane surge of sanity—finally gave up an old purse to Good Will.

This was the closet rod that was supposed to be mine when we designed the closet. I only had a couple of dresses and was pretty sure I’d never own more. Uh-huh. That was back when I was pregnant all the time and had given up any thought of using a mirror for the rest of my life. It was a good idea, considering what I see on a daily basis these days

Here’s the end of the story: while things are collapsing in my closet, and in some ways, in my life, it is good not to be alone. It took Guy—who had not fallen off the roof—fifteen minutes to hang that closet rod back up, and to replace all the weight of my past lives and hopes for the future back onto it. And, in the process, he found about fifty empty hangers.

And as long as this new rod arrangement stays put, I can say as proudly as any other woman of grit: Tomorrow is another day.

Oh- and what was that sound I’d heard? Thousands of metal hanger-hooks, sliding down a metal rod. It really does sound like I said it did. Try it. You’ll be amazed.

Murphy before having his teeth removed. He is looking at a dog who is almost buried in the snow.

Self portrait. Without pajamas

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations, Just life | 16 Comments

Techno-kids

Posted on February 4, 2008 by K

January 28^th

Today, we lived through a monster storm. The weather people had been tracking the thing for days, network putting up suggestions about getting enough candles and things – just in case. We ended up with about a quarter of an inch of snow on our windshields. I’m told it was more interesting up north. What we did get was a freezing wind that beat the pasture into a sort of frozen surf.

Last night, President Hinkley died. (The long-time and well-beloved president of our church.) I am not going to write out my feelings about that, other than to say I had them. What I do want to talk about is a sort of epiphany I had today, thinking about the aftermath of that news. It was Guy’s sister in Orem who called us about it. We were watching PBS at the time, which did not register the sudden rocking of the earth. It took Gigi calling for us to find out. And then it began.

Within ten minutes I had called one of my kids in Missouri, another in San Diego and my family in Texas. And then I sent an email that went to New York, Virginia, Washington, Northern England—so many places. Some of our friends in England had already heard about it from some friends in the Netherlands. Evidently, the news – like puck – circled the globe in less than forty minutes.

The daughter in a shirt her brother designed (to order – -in Engrish) in Gimp and Inkscape and had printed (to order) at Cafe-press. Self publishing gone fabric.

But that isn’t the amazing part. What is truly astonishing has to do with the youth of the church. If every message that left every cell phone had been laser visual, the entire country would have been overlaid by a woven fabric of light. Within half an hour kids – connected by face-to-face friendships, or myspace or facebook friendships – had sent out mass texts, consoling each other and laying plans to show respect by wearing their Sunday best to school the next day – that or yellow (why yellow?).

This is a different world than the one we grew up in; in those old days, you could be completely isolated, the only LDS kid in your school, or alone among many in your ward who just weren’t like you at all – a world full of single kids, quiet, unconnected, in too many ways alone. But now, the kids are connected to people all over the planet, a lonely kid in Wisconsin best friends with a kid in Paris and a kid in Ft. Lauderdale and a kid in Peru.

The Son, thrilled to get a new drive enclosure for Christmas – whoopie! For his interior Mac drive, recently replaced by a 120 Gig drive. Replaced by the boy himself, who is not afraid to void his warrantee. Or mine, for that matter.

Kids who once had nobody to talk to now talk to a world – all the time, at the speed of light. It’s true of all kids, but this sudden and mighty cohesion of our youth means something new for the future, something powerful, something that is growing quietly and geometrically. I am feeling the stirring of a new reality, and I can’t help but wonder where it will take us. It has to be an almost spiritual revolution because it has so little to do with physicality.

The married children, opening a gift from the far away married sister, who is watching the opening via video chat, as you can see by the open lap top, alert and broadcasting.

Like some kind of blossoming mass mind.

How interesting for the future.

Posted in Just life | 9 Comments

Needle in a—

Posted on January 26, 2008 by K

I own a haystack. I have to admit that I find this remarkable. Then again, I suppose it isn’t any more remarkable than the fact that I also on a little red barn and five horses, and a tiny piece of ground to keep them on. And then, there’s the old draft horse of a Suburban and the horse trailer. Now I’m thinking about it, I also have a refrigerator, which is a fairly odd thing for a person to own. And a number of toilets.

When we were first married—well, I’m talking ten or twelve years into it—my husband told me that every time he opened a cupboard to find some medicine or spices or whatever, he was always surprised that the stuff inside it was ours. Like, he expected it to be his mother’s. My first answer would have been (back then) that if he were the one who had scootched his little old self and several small children on over to the grocery store to procure all that stuff, he might not see the thing so much as a magic cabinet. But there you are: it is odd to find yourself all grown up and owning nesting tables and heating pads.

But this story is about the haystack. Building it is one of the huge events of the year. Somebody has to grow the stuff, praying for no rain after the cutting, and then be willing to sell it to me. And deliver it. Then I have to find several strong backs to stack the stuff in that nice little place in my barn. And after that, I hover over it for months, panic stricken that there won’t be enough. With that in mind, I stack it high and tight. Which is only good husbandry. But in the end, I also have to get it unstacked so I can feed it to my steeds.

Every morning, as early as I can stand it – which is not terribly early in the winter, as I can abide neither cold nor darkness – I get on out there to the barn to feed my guys. Horses stand around all night long with their feet in snow and their butt-ends to the freezing wind in—lately—seven degree and below weather. How they do this without freezing, I’m sure I don’t know. How wasps do it, I really don’t know – but they thaw out, the nasty things, in the spring, and may even freeze and thaw again before they have a chance to sting anybody.

The way you warm up a horse in NOT to put a blanket-jacket on him. Blankets just keep them from growing their plush winter coats – and I do mean plush, especially if there’s any pony blood in the animal. No, the way you warm them up is to feed them. The act of eating hay heats a horse up so well and so fast, you can see steam rising from their backs as they eat on a cold winter day. So I try to be there early after a bad night, just to stoke the furnaces.

I come back in the evening, just before dark, and do the same thing, feeding a measure of hay and another of grain. And thus we come back to the haystack. My stack is about fourteen feet high. And each bale weighs about eighty pounds. The roof slopes, so those top bales are just sort of wedged in up there at the top, and the only way to get up to them is to let the horses eat my way to it, pulling the lowest and farthest out bales first, and making a sort of giant staircase to the top.

Sometimes when I’m out there, I’m gone a little extra long – mucking out the stalls, or cleaning hooves or what have you. And once in a while, somebody from home will call just to check and make sure I have not been kicked in the head or crushed against the wall or run over. Last week, Guy called to check up, and I was, as I almost always am, just fine. In fact, I was nearly on my way home. All I had left to do was climb up on the top of the stack and pull down the morning’s bale of hay.

So I hung up, and I climbed. And what follows is a picture essay of what happens when everybody at home thinks you are all safe and hunky-dory and you get a little full of yourself and careless:

I had climbed up there with my two red hooks in my hand – sliding eighty pounds of porcupine-textured hay across several others of the same is not an easy job,

and the hooks help when you can’t get up above the darn things. The only problem is, sometimes you think your hooks are buried deep into the hay—when they’re not.

So what you see here is a reenactment of the actual bone-headed stupidity:

So, as they say, let that be a lesson to you. Hey—don’t play around with hooks, or you just might fall. Or something like that.

Posted in Just life | 17 Comments

Traditions—gotta love ’em

Posted on December 14, 2007 by K

Some shots of the new studio room: (and the lovely musical son):

More Christmas

While in our house the Great Thanksgiving Feast is about food, ritual, family and tradition (is that the same as ritual?), the Great Christmas Feast has more to do with eyes, ears, smells, family, ritual and tradition. The season begins for us the moment the last turkey sandwich is constructed on the day of Pilgrims—switches are thrown, the darkness of winter and life driven back by the dancing of thousands of tiny lights draped outside our tree room window. Carols are sung during the clean up of the epic dinner. The tree goes up that weekend—and the garlands, stretched across the beams of the house—and a bit more happens every day, boxes schlepped downstairs, lifted down or dug out of their long sleep, treasures spilled onto couch and ottoman, and all the nooks and corners are rigged up to throw light back and forth and so welcome hope, invite surprise and delight, and tinge the gray of uncertainty with colors that speak of possibility.

I speak of ritual: there are certain chairs that must be stood upon to raise this side of the garland, certain otherwise constant features of the house carried upstairs to be stowed in Murphy’s room while stables and sheep and camels (these all carried home in long ago years by my parents from Egypt and Israel), families with babies and shepherds take their places.

There are also certain bad words expected when the gloriously chaotic, decorative picks we load onto the tree room garland are constantly slipping out to scatter across the floor.

And then, there is the tree.

Our tree tradition goes way back—and since I am the tree maven, starts with my side of the family. My parents chose, living in mid-LA as we did when I was very young, to have a fake tree. It was really a pretty awful affair, hard green plastic. The trunk was formed from green cones that stacked, each one with rows of two inch long, green plastic protuberances. These were the receivers for the hard plastic branches, which bristled in their turn with hard plastic spines. Upon those spines were affixed the pine needle units. It was a very plain, open architecture, good for hanging lots of things.

I remember going in and out of the garage/storage-room all through the rest of the year, looking up at the very orderly, sturdy shelves my dad had built and seeing the box for that tree, way up toward the ceiling. Seeing it and getting a secret Christmas thrill right in the middle of the summer. I still have that box. My parents, who have never tended to the sentimental – especially mom, who’d just as soon throw something out now than next month – somehow ended up giving it to me, maybe shipping something to me in it, I don’t remember. Anyway, for a good decade or more, that poor box, nearly as old as I am, now sits up in the corner of Char’s closet, full of tissue paper for present wrapping.

Here is where our carrying on of tradition begins: the tree lights. Mom and Dad used to use the big C-9s on that old tree. Those lights used to come with a bead through which the two wires that came out of the base of each light passed, a bead you could slide up and down the wires—the point being that you could slip the two wires around the branch/twig upon which you wanted to mount your light, then seat the light by sliding the big bead up till it snugged the branch. I don’t know how many strings my folks used, but I’m betting no more than two. On the day when the lights came out of their boxes, we children were banished from the living room. Banished from the house. Because Dad put those lights on the tree every year, and every year, he used a vocabulary saved only for this time, and for when he cut his fingers off in the shop (which he never really did).

Then came the careful placing of the ornaments—I had my own little places for certain ornaments, things now long lost to me. And then the absolutely delicate placing of the tinsel—never to be never thrown on, and certainly not clumped—which would, at the end of the season be lovingly collected back into its cardboard packaging.

The tree room, without a tungsten filter or flash. You can see how the outside lights reflect in all of the windows.

I don’t do tinsel anymore. In fact, we had a live tree every year for a long, long time when Guy and I first married. But tradition will out, and I am the person now with the vocabulary. Live trees do not last long when they are smothered in lights. As I am partial to my house, I was finally forced to face the probabilities, so when Gin moved out in college and Cammon left on his mission and so weren’t there to help anymore, I finally bought a fake tree.

Six hours worth of lighting each year became six hours done only once and capitalized every year after. This cut down on my Christmas swearing by a considerable percentage. But I am still holding faith with my father; someone has to explain to me how a string of lights that has worked beautifully for a month, been stored away for eleven, and then brought out again, plugged in and brightly lit for two days the next year can suddenly and simply just go dark. Right in the middle of the tree. The decorated tree.

This is where years of vocabulary building comes in handy. And when you spend two hours undressing the tree, unwinding the lights, lying on your back underneath the thing like you’re changing the oil, it is inevitable that halfway through the process the (colorful explicative) string will suddenly light right up again: Hello! Merry Christmas!! Here I am working!! Why are you under the tree????

Our tree is jammed with ornaments. Some of them I made when I was maybe ten, twelve years old. I think I started the making ornaments thing. Or my Aunt Polly did, one year when we visited her, by opening up the world of glue and glitter to me. After that, I went to felt. Then to satin and beads. Then, decades later, to every conceivable medium – clay, glass, wire, beads, wood, felt, fabric, fleece. We have ornaments my father made in 1967, and that my mom and dad sent me – one each every year for a very long time – beaded bells, lace angels, wooden barns, clever little sculptures of old fashioned phones and lighthouses and all kinds of things. And there are the things Guy has made, and the many, many things the children have made.

Not a lot of detail in these – maybe you can see something. I don’t know how to do the click and it’s gigantic thing.

And then, there is the party. I have written about it before. It started with my parents, when my father was Bishop, an ornament exchange with a few friends they worked with at church. My favorite of the ones my parents won is a popsicle stick snowflake, three of them glued together, painted red on one side. On the other side there is written in the same red paint and with a non-too-dainty brush: “Wrong Side. Turn This Side Toward Tree.”

So the year after we moved into this house – the house Guy and I had built together – we started our own party with a few close friends. It was Hoffmans, Loukes, Tricia, Smiths and a few others—and for twenty eight years the party has gone on, more good friends added very slowly over time—but the same basic list of people, moaning over the obligations of creativity. People who had not known each other have become old friends over our cut-throat game. It’s been an amazing thing.

The game is nothing new—you bring a wrapped home-made ornament, choose numbers, open a wrapped one in your turn, or steal one somebody else has opened. Third winner keeps. Takes hours. Engenders creative cheating, public begging, energetic accolades, tears—and brings out the wit in even me. So I am including pictures of us and this year’s crop of ornaments. Of Dick’s, I have actually done a photo essay—he never plays the game right, but whatever he does, it’s ALWAYS worthy of an essay.

Some year, Cam wants us all to play the game, but then donate our ornaments, putting them up on Ebay for auction, money to be given to charity. And some year, when we have all grown up enough to overcome our greed (some of these ornaments take months to make), we just might do that.

I’m going to cap this off with a serious observation: our lives have been so enriched by this kind of thing—long-time friends, strong traditions that connect our years and give direction and shape (not to mention pleasure and fun and roaring good times) to our lives. I taught my children a long time ago: if you want a really great birthday party, just figure you’re going to plan it yourself. Because that’s what life is—you get it as a gift, then you have to pick it up in your own two hands and shape it yourself. Shape it into something you can treasure, something that will dance like light against the darkness that inevitably comes to us.

The end of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” is just too sweet and schmaltzy for some people, but I’m telling you, much of the precious truth is just that, and I would give much—and have given much—to know the feeling in George Bailey’s heart as he stands under that tree with his kids and family around him, knowing that he has done some good for people, and that there are people in the world who would go a ways to do some good for him. Love isn’t something you fall into, or win in a sweepstakes, or get dropped on your head by an arbitrary God—or even that you win by good deeds. It’s something you build. Something you plant and nurture, something that you can always give, even if you are never given any yourself.

And it’s worth it. It’s so worth it. To give up being right all the time, or being in control, or getting the last cookie, or being rich—to give up all that stuff that creates divisiveness and to replace it with service, with civility, with kindness, with self-less love and giving.

I do not want to bring up the slow death of Christmas as a festival of rejoicing, gratitude and religious wonder—but it is so symptomatic of our times. The very things that Christ taught, that he demonstrated with his life, are the things in which we find lasting and solid joy and underlying, unquenchable peace and happiness. Not jumping on the beds happiness, just sitting quietly and glowing happiness, or even just floating on the top and not drowning happiness. People may believe what they will, but on this earth, what goes up must come down, and all the philosophy and glib argument and emotional manipulation in the world will not change that.

So, again – Merry Christmas. I leave you with what I believe myself, with what I have seen to be dear and valuable and true in this world, and again, with my best wishes for your joy, your full heart, your wonderful life.

Some of the ornaments: (many snuck out without being recorded):