Tings Bruk Down

 

This is a bathroom ceiling fan.

Specifically, this is the ceiling fan that has been sucking clouds of shower steam out of MY bathroom since long before it was mine (or my Bride's, whose mortgage the Little House was in, and whose name is on the ownership document...). Our guess is that it dates from somewhere around the Eighties; that would be consistent with the provenance of a LOT of the post-Twenties work done on this house.

(Which, I should remind you, was massively fucked with after the house fire sometime around then, when the occupants took the insurance money, spent it all on hookers and blow, or Vegas, or any other damn thing than making halfway-decent repairs on the poor little house...)

Well, about sometime this spring the old fan began making expensive squealing noises and shutting down. I suspected that the fan bearing had worn our, advised the rest of the Fire Direction crew not to use it, and contemplated having to replace it with no real enthusiasm.

After putting the distasteful chore off as long as possible (and long enough for some nasty mildew to build up on the bathroom ceiling) I finally went to the friendly Home Depot folks and bought a new fan.

 
Went to the 1920's attic stairs, pulled them down, and read, stamped on the upper section in 1920's ink:

"Maximum weight: 200 lbs".

I think I was below 200 some time back in 1988, right after I got out of the service all lean and hungry. And since then food and I have been better acquainted, and that weight is long since gone.

Luckily I have good friend who aren't so damn fat. And are also good people, and kindly, and pretty awesome handimen, too, so it was my friend Brent who came over with toolkit in hand and headlamp and power drill, and...

...yanked the old junker, checked the wiring (still good), put in the new fan, tested it to see if it worked (it did), fixed it to the joist, and there we had it; a new fan.

Thank you, Brent! I owe you something nice, really, and that's not even counting for snaking the nasty damn utility sink in the basement that was running slow because of the nasty washing machine lint!

Now I just have to spackle and paint the new L-angle piece of drywall and it'll be a thing of beauty and a joy...well, until the NEXT time it craps out. Hopefully some time in the 2060s long after I'm dead.

When I was with my ex, whose family were very "boat-y" people, they liked to say that a sailboat was a hole in the water into which you poured money.

Yeah, well, home ownership. Let's talk.

And speaking of fucked up things...

I see our new House Republican overlords finally got tired of pantsing Kevin Fucking McCarthy and let the poor stupid sod play Bang the Gavel.

The clusterfuckery was entertaining, yes, but let's not let it distract us from the plot of the story "The Cannibal Children Come To The Birthday Party".

The Traitor Twenty did what they did as much to extort their fap fanstasies of endless Hunter Biden and the other QANut nonsense we're now going to get 24/7/365 from these fucksticks.

But hidden in the pile of MAGAt shit is this tasty little raisin, noted by Kyle Cheney at Politico and emphasized by emptywheel:

Yep.

They're going to use their power to destroy the notes that the DoJ took on their criminal fuckin' conspiracy

So, even as we contemplate the goodness of new bathroom fans and good home improvement news, we need to remember that for at least the next two years we're going to be ruled - to the extent they can - by people who tried to betray the Constitutional requirement to peacefully transfer power to the winner of the general election.

That is, by traitors no different in fact from those guilty of Confederate treason 162 years ago.

And it's also a reminder that the thing that distinguished a criminal like Trump from a criminal like Nixon is that Nixon's crimes were, at bottom, political. 

Nixon had an agenda - loathsome, true - that he wanted to rule by. He had made his bones kneecapping his political enemies in California, and he grew to power with the same vicious political instincts until he finally went too far for even his political party to ignore.

Trump, on the other hand, was just a mobbed-up grifter, a real-estate crook with the instincts of a made guy. His crimes were the crimes of a streetcorner hood, a Mob guy, running his numbers and thumbbreaking his debtors (and stiffarming his creditors).

So it should be no surprise that the remoras that have fastened themselves to the Mob that is the Republican Party are not that much different. They know they're guilty of criminal conspiracy.

And, like their Orange Julius Caesar, they're now trying to use legal bullshit and lies to escape with their gains.

Well, the American people did, at least in this case, vote for these sonsofbitches.

And now, thanks to the people who voted for these sonsofbitches, all of us are gonna get it, good and hard.

But at least I'll have a nice new bathroom ceiling fan when they implode the debt ceiling this October.

For Labrys

 She doesn't post to the 'net anymore but since she's still in this space I thought I'd us it to write her back.

Get it?

 

I do enjoy your old-school handwritten correspondence; I promise - really, no shit, promise - to actually write, pen-and-paper, back to you. 

 

But for now, this will have to make do.

Bottom line? I'm...good-ish. The thing I wrote away back still holds; here, now, I'm fine. Oh, sure, I have the usual pissing and moaning any GI has a right to, but it's mostly First World Problems. But I'm still the "optipess" I was then; happy locally, dismal globally.

At home? My Bride is lovely, and The Girl is a lot of salty teenage fun.

The Boy? Is being pretty useless at the moment. 

He's given up pretending to be striking for a PGE lineman job. His latest scheme is supposedly looking for something as a cop...but his "effort" in that direction is lacking, well, pretty much everything. He's talked about applying for the Portland Bureau's "cadet" thing this winter, but the Bureau began taking applications back in September and his is still unfinished. I've pointed him towards the Criminal Justince programs at both our local colleges and he's done nothing there.

He is still doing what he did in high school; hanging around playing videogames all day and into the night. 

If he was actually any good I'd recommend he fly to Seoul and try to get on a professional team, but I'm skeptical he'd have the remorseless drive to do that; as far as I can see he games for the giggles.

Now. Me?

My only real bitch is that my new knees have refused to shake off the weird post-op thing that they developed nearly immediately; my shins and insteps are partially numb.

 

Not completely; I have feeling in them. But they have that sort of tingling you get when you sit or lie on an arm or leg wrong and cut off the nerve impulses? Y'know what I'm talking about? "Asleep" as in "Oh, my foot's asleep" when you've sat with your leg tucked under you too long.

 

The fronts of my knees are like that, too, which isn't really a shock given the massive insult involved in tearing onto them, hacking out the bones, and then shoving in metal bits and sewing them back together.

 

But the instep thing?

 

That's weird, and I figured it'd wear off after a while. Nope. I'm to the point of calling the cutter and asking WTF. Not a life-changing problem, but...weird.

 

Other than that, I'm well and healthy. I'm enjoying the first couple of weeks of my retirement. I'm looking at ideas for more writing, including possibly flogging my "battles" pieces to a publisher or magazines. We'll see how that goes.

 

It's on the larger scale that I despair.

Beginning here in Portland, where the local government has decided to go with the Stupid Option for dealing with the homeless situation. I've been over and over this and it's not really worth rehashing other than to note that with a whole range of options to pick from the City commissioners went for the most crude and dismal - herding the scruffy poor into camps. Yeah, because that's worked so well before.

That and the local version of the "crime" panic has let the worthless fucking Police Bureau off the hook again, another subject we've beat to death here and not worth recounting, but my kid might be involved some day (are you reading this, kid? If you want that you gotta get your shit together!) so I keep hoping that someone or ones will force the worthless bastards to be better.

Then move up to the state, where the even-more-worthless GOP managed slight gains in the lege despite being no less worthless than ever (and even moreso in the case if the idiotic Greater Idaho nonsense) as a testimony to the poor taste of the average Oregon voter.

And from there to the nation, where, likewise, the GQP now will flood the federal House with shit in the words of the immortal Steve "I Fell Asleep Drunk With My Head In The Stewpot" Bannon. We're guaranteed two years of unmitigated monkey-shit-flinging about Hunter Biden, Tony Fauci, China Virus, J6 Conspiracies, and every other looney QANut bullshit thing ever thought of.

And meanwhile the climate continues to slowly boil.

I don't want to be dead any more than any other person who ever existed. But there are times I'm glad I'm old. I don't want to be here when the bills come due, the bills for our fucking stupidity about the industrial age, for our fucking unwillingness to call weird and creepy fascists weird and creepy fascists, for our very-human-but-utterly-dysfunctional happiness to whistle past all the difficult and dangerous issues that we should be willing and able to address.

Fucking people, as SSG Layne would have said, they could fuck up a wet dream.

But.

I'm still here. I'm still trying to do what I can. I'm still enjoying what life and living bring me.

And that's pretty much all anyone can do.

So. I hope this finds you and yours safe and well. May the aches of our age lie lightly upon you. May you find some moments of clarity and peace. May you be well and do well, for yourself and for those you love.

I remain,

your friend.

J

Toes, again

I have this friend. She's a sort of epistolary friend, seeing that she lives in Colorado, so I've never actually met her. But she and I correspond through our Facebooks, and share the commonality of having a daughter who was born of another mother.

But here's something my friend does that's kind of a chuckle. She posts pictures of her toes.

Seriously.

Wherever she goes, or sometimes just for her own amusement, she posts a shot of her feet standing on, or in, whatever or whereever she's going. I call these things "Where In The World Are Maia's Toes?" pictures.

Well, at the moment Maia's toes, the rest of Maia, her loving inamorato, and her adorable little girl, are in sunny Nayarit, Mexico.

And whenever she posts her "Where Are Maia's Toes" photo it will undoubtedly be delightfully warm and sunny.

Now. Here's where MY toes were this morning:

My in-laws have this game they play. Well, it's not an actual "game", it's more of a sort of contest they enter into whenever they get together. It's called "My Life SUCKS!" and the object is to lay down such an irrefutably wretched whine that nobody else in the family group can top it. Ideally your story is so jaw-droppingly awful that it's like a mike drop and you win walking away. You got cancer? Well, my cancer had a tumor. You got laid off work? Well I got laid off, then my unemployment got denied.

Then I got cancer.

You see how this works. And you can't win by coming directly out and saying "My life sucks." You have to present your little tale of woe so artfully, so passively, as to seem to be simply telling the story of your past week, or month, or your prospects or lack of same. You can't be seen as actively thumping the tub for your life-suckage. You just have to lay some tracks down and hope that your sucky life is more sucky than anyone elses. Then you win.

I ask my Bride, so, what do you win? and she looks at me like I just coughed up a hairball. You win because your life sucks the most, duh! Nobody else can top you, you are the King (or Queen) of Suckulation and everyone else has to pity you and feel for you because of the massive suck your life is.

Anyway, the point is that, based on the whole toes thing; neener, neener, Maia. MY life sucks worse than yours at the moment.

Gee. That didn't feel nearly as good at it's supposed to.

Maybe I need to talk to my Bride. There must be some sort of in-law thing here that I'm just not getting.

Deaths of strangers

I opened up my Facebook today to find out that Robin Williams has died, probably by his own hand, probably after losing a fight with his own demons of depression and addiction.

I found two things odd about this.

First, that so many people were expressing actual sorrow, saying that they wanted to cry, that they were personally grieved and felt personal loss. Only one of them - Lisa Jakub - actually met Williams personally, worked with him, and has lost someone she knew and loved. But I'm fairly sure that my friends Chris and Carrie and all the other friends posting messages of loss didn't know him other than as an image on a screen. I'm not saying that they didn't care, in the same way that I care about favorite places, or beloved stories or music, or about people in distant lands in a sort of abstract way that I don't want bad things to happen to anyone outside the Cheney family.

And, second, hard after that was that I didn't, not really, not about Robin Williams, and I immediately felt like a heel; everybody else is posting sadz about the man's death and my only thought as I read it was "Hunh. How 'bout that..?" like I was reading about a water main break on Burnside or a traffic tie-up on I-5 South.

Then I thought, y'know, I don't know the poor guy. I know him as "Mork" or his other pixel images on a screen, so essentially he's as "real" to me as Oscar the Grouch or the Wizard of Oz. I don't have any particular connection or bigger emotional investment in the man's death - or life - than I do in the water main break or the traffic tie-up. For me they're all just "news".

I think I've talked about this bizarre aspect of electronic media and celebrity culture before. We "know" all sorts of people from television and films that we don't really "know" in any sort of real sense. We may feel like Robin Williams' films, or part of his work, or just what we think of as his personality were important parts of our lives. But what did we really know of Mr. Williams? Of what he loved, of what he hated and feared, what made him happy or sad, why he did what he did and was who he was.

It may seem like we "knew" him, though, because his image was as recognizable as those of our own family.

So it still seems odd to me. Was this man a part of our lives, as much a part as any other friend? Enough so that his loss is grievous to us? Is an emotion based on a created intimacy as genuine as one from an intimacy that springs from artless Nature?

Joseph Stalin once said "One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic"?

Perhaps one death is, too.

Or perhaps it isn't.

Christmas Eve 1986

It was a practice in Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion (Airborne) (Light) 187th Infantry Regiment for the unmarried sergeants to volunteer to take holiday duty for the wedded guys. So that's why I found myself standing on the landing outside the dayroom of the HHC barracks Christmas Eve day dressed tastefully in holiday-green tropical fatigues and a santa-red beret being violently abused by a Panamanian taxi driver.

It seems that one of our American heroes had, in an excess of Christmas cheer, commandeered the driver's services to motor all around Panama Viejo attempting to find a shapely little elf who would supply a Christmas stocking that he could fill.

Not surprisingly, given his slobberingly drunk condition, the only attentions he could find came from ladies who expected to receive green, folding presents in return, which struck our young hero as more than a little Grinchy.

This seeker of the true Spirit of Christmas imbibed some Chistmas spirits and then resolved to return to his only REAL family, his buddies at HHC 2/187, only to find on arrival that one of Santa's little ho-ho-hoes had lifted his wallet during his importunations. Or he had left it on the bar. Or whatever.

The upshot was, anyway, that he now had nothing to give the infuriated driver whose worn taxi now reeked of cheap perfume and drunken G.I. Worse yet, he turned out to be nimble as a monkey - even drunk - and had shinnied up the mango tree in front of the barracks and was hiding in the branches lobbing the occasional overripe fruit at both the driver and the taxi windshield.

The street in front of the barrack reeked of mango juice and the combined noise of a furious taxi driver and an intoxicated arboreal G.I. This, in turn, drew a small crowd of pre-Christmas revelers, who took turns abusing both parties and shying additional fruit at the taxi when the driver wasn't watching.

I managed to pay off the driver, scatter the crowd and talk the monkey-boy out of the tree just as one of my other single friends came sauntering down from his post as battalion staff duty NCO.

"I see life in the slums is still exotic and vigorous, even on Christmas Eve" he sneered.

SGT Chief: "Little you know about it, lolling about up there at Battalion as you do. It's like a freakin' Jerry Springer show down here, you know. Oh, and a Merry Christmas to you, too, jackass."

BN SDNCO: "Yeah, well, lucky for us that the first Christmas happened in Bethehem, not Fort Kobbe, eh?"

SGT Chief: "Why's that?"

BN SDNCO: "'Cause where the hell'd you find three wise men and a virgin around here..?"

It was an old joke but I was still chuckling as I ran back up the stairs to the dayroom to share warm Coke with the three guys watching football.

This year, as they have for the past eleven years now, American soldiers are preparing for a holiday in faraway places much less entertaining and far more hazardous than my Panamanian Christmas Eve two and a half decades ago. I'm sure that they share many of the same feelings I did then: loneliness, regret, some pride in a hard job well done in demanding circumstances, but mixed with others I didn't; fear of death or wounding, anger and grief at lost friends, hope that their own homecoming will be soon and safe.

As do I.

So Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah...however you say it, however you celebrate it, all you young - and not so young - men and women in the hard places far from home; I hope you will all be home soon to enjoy this time with your families.

And to you, all my friends here, from near and far, let me say that although I have no more religion than I have hair on the top of my head and no more faith than I have illusions regarding nations, men, and women I'm touched on the heart a bit every year on this night of all the nights when we pretend that there really can be Peace on Earth to men and women of goodwill.

May you and yours find sleep this night at peace, surrounded by love and the loving of those you cherish. May you wake tomorrow to good cheer, and the promise of a better, brighter day.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; tonight let us put aside what we know of the world and our fellow men and simply live in hopes that there can, indeed, be a silent night made holy by the caring and loving of one for another, and of us all.

Goodnight.

None Dare Call It Treason

So I'm sitting with the Girl on the predawn couch this morning.

The Girl: "I don't think I want any more playdates with XXX (now apparently-former best friend)"

Daddy: "Why is that, sweetie?"

The Girl: "Because... (complex explanation of what boils down to "I'm the Queen and she doesn't always do what the Queen wants her to do")...and I think that YYY (now apparently-new best friend) is much better at (another complex explanation that boils down to "is MUCH better at playing the way I want")."

Daddy:(softly sings "Make new friends/but keep the old/one is silver/and the other's gold")

The Girl: "Mmmmm. I don't get it."

The thing is that YYY really is a very sweet little girl who loves all things Pony and Winx and cartooning and storytelling, just like the Queen.

But XXX has her own ideas of what constitutes "fun", and the Queen tolerates no independence amongst her ladies-in-waiting.

So all unbeknownst to her young Lady XXX has been summarily condemned to the Tower, the rope and the block.

So perish all traitors.

Timber!

So after our busy Saturday we had a fairly busy Sunday. I took the Boy and his pal to Lasertag and then out to Beaverton to give a basic rifle marksmanship lesson to our pals the Ravas. And came back to another friends' open house for the neighborhood.

Nothing momentious, just a pleasant rainy day full of small pleasures.

But between returning from lasering and going to Beaverton BRM-training this fell from the sky on top of me:

This branch fell probably 20 to 25 feet from the street tree just outside our city strip. The tree itself is a sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), "...a deciduous tree in the genus Liquidambar native to warm temperate areas of eastern North America and tropical montane regions of Mexico and Central America." Apparently this species has some value as a medicinal and food source: "Slashed to the cambium, sap will leak out and harden. The resulting gum can be chewed. Unripe fruit can be crushed and soaked in alcohol to make a medicinal tincture. The bark can be used to make a medicinal tea."

Not mentioned in the literature, however, is that the sonofabitch is structurally unsound and tends to shed branches in anything stronger than a gentle zephyr. We've already had a sizeable piece of the tophamper drop on the Subaru and any sort of strong wind leaves branch litter around the base.

And don't get me started on the seedpods/fruits/nutcases:

These fucking things drop all...year..round, wind or no, and function as very effective caltrops when you have forgotten to take the trash out to the curb and have to rush out in the predawn dark barefoot.

The strange thing is that yesterday afternoon there wasn't a breath of wind. I was walking out to the car, Mojo and the Boy were on the sidewalk nearby when I felt a hard blow, like a heavy punch, on the shoulder. I staggered sideways a bit and look around to see who had hit me and there this branch was; I'd gotten the thick end instead of the fluffy, leafy end and had it been two inches west or a half a second sooner I'd have taken it square atop the skull.

No noise, either; no cracking, no sound of leaves rustling, just...BANG, and a big ol' branch in the street beside me.

Which just, again, reminds me how freakish and random Life is. We amble through life taking every day, every night, each breath, every sunrise and birdsong and hug and kiss, each breathless moment at the height of lovemaking, every rich explosion of flavor on the tongue...every single warm cuddle from little bodies fitted to our chests, every syllable of happy babble, every tear, the good pull and stretch of strong muscle worked hard, each and every lingering glance of greeting and farewell with the casual acceptance that we give a yawn or a passing car or a flickering light. We expect life to rise to greet us every day, every heart to just continue beating, every tire to track smoothly, every breath to begin as the last one ends.

The fuzzy-huggy-bunny-wuffy-ladybuggery adoption folks have this thing about the "red thread" that connects you to your magical baby that God (and it is usually God) has picked out for you and how that means that everything will work out for the best; you will always be tied to your love by this mystic invisible red thread.

But if there's anything I've learned in this journey towards the grave, it's that life itself is a tenuous thread, a spindly, blood-red thread that may break or fail at any time. One minute you'll be fine, the next one of you will be gone.

On the one hand, this is terrifying. The body that feels so sturdy, the life that seems so complete...a flu germ, a layoff, an affair, a little too much anesthaesia, and it is gone as thoroughly as the dream of a dream. Nothing is certain. Nothing can be counted on. All is vanity and striving after nothingness.

And yet...tilt your glance and it isn't.

Everything we humans build and are; every house, every love, every layer of fat, bone and muscle, is ephemeral. We are all doomed from the moment we are born. And yet in those moments between darkness and darkness, what towers we can raise! What loves we can lift, what momuments to strength and caring and honor and passion!!

If we choose.

So every day a little death...and yet, every day, every day, is a gift of life. Each time we hold our children, each day we tell our lovers we love them, each day we work and laugh and cry and love and hate...each day is a goddam miracle, and we live and move through them like gods, like heroes.

Or we can. We should.

So today, take a moment to savor your life. LIVE it. Listen to the rain. Meditate. Do a kata until it's as perfect as you can make it. Make a great cup of coffee and a buttered croissant.

Hug your daughter extra tight.

The night is dark and long. That branch may fall this way to tragedy instead of that way to trivia. But we can fear the dark and the fall, or we can bask in and savor the brilliant daylight that is all the brighter for coming between the sunrise and the sunset.

And I hope tomorrow you wake to a sunny day full of love and happiness, work hard, play foolishly, and go to sleep tired and content.

Every day you live you are a gift of love.

Istantinople

In a world full of odd coincidences, a friend of mine sent me the link to this peculiarly funny video clip...
...at the same time that I was reading the section about the fall of Constantinople in O'Shea's Sea of Faith.

The world is a very strange place.

(h/t to Moscow Minx for the video link!)

Far above rubies

My friend Lisa is not feeling well.

In a world where it seems to me that undeserved praise, unwarranted ease, slippery self-justification, and special pleading are - and perhaps always have been - the rule rather than the exception, I have always found that Lisa is that rare person who seldom takes the easy path paved with excuses. She is a quality compounded of wit, knowledge, grace and beauty that makes Woman, a certain breed of woman, the crowning achievement of Creation. One that use hairy, less-evolved types would do well to simply admire in seemly silence.

I hope she feels better soon, because, like the sunrise on the ocean or the dawn chorus heard at the edge of the dark forest, she lightens a world which is a grayer and drabber place without her moving through it with lightness and verve.

And for her convalesence, a poem.

TWILIGHT: AFTER HAYING

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed—
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
—sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen . . . the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses. . . .

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

Jane Kenyon

Hope you're feeling more the thing soon, Lisa. Probae esti in segetem sunt deteriorem datae fruges, tamen ipsae suaptae enitent.

Commo Check

Just wondering. I have been noting that I don't see some familiar handles in the comments section anymore. And most of those dropping off the net are my old adoption peeps; Atomic Mama and Walternatives still drop by every once in a while, and Linda (I have to say that when I think of you in blogious terms, Linda, I still subconsiously think of you as "SBird" of The Singing Bird.) stops off once in a blue moon or two but Dee, Beeb, Red Sand, are you guys still out there? Just haven't found much to comment about? Or are you over blogs and blogging? Or are you just not finding what works for you here?

And, of course, there are some people I know I've lost; Millicent from Different Dirt has cut me dead, and I lost a couple of former ALTs in the Great DefALT of May three years ago. So no Little Maple, no Wicked Witch...it's too bad. I miss you guys. Every so often I check your blogs. But it's like we just don't have anything to say anymore.

Of, course, there's always facebook...but...but...

Oh, well. Gotta go pick up the kidlets. Back with more in a bit.

Hey, hey

...it's a Sunny Day! The kids are sleeping in their beds today,take a pic, and fly away,hey, hey, it's a sunny day!


Picture heavy post today, mostly since the day was so lovely and sunny it cried out for pictures.

Mojo ended up working a tad lateish on Friday anyway, so I took the younglings and asked Peep were he wanted to go for dinner. The final Jeopardy answer?

Burgerville!

Now as fast food goes, I like the 'Ville. They're local, they try and get their community props by being Oregonian and all green and recycley, their food is usually at or slightly above the usual run of sliders-n-grease. So St. John's Burgerville it was. Dad unloaded two silly, chattery kids in the little parking lot and the trouble started almost immediately.

Little Miss wasn't her usual happy self; Today's Special was Whiny with Not Listening sauce and a side of Demanding. The Peep had his own brand of whine, coupled with a need to have whatever she had right at that moment. AND they ordered a ton of food, most of which they freaking wasted. By the time we straggled back to the house I was as fried as the burgers, out of charity with my progeny, and retreated down to the shop to grumble and cuss.My bride, being the lovely and heroic woman she is, handled this debouchemont of cranky strangers with aplomb, got Missy quieted and jammied, got the Peep parked in front of his Friday-late-night-TV ritual and all down by ten.

Still. Ugh. Don't mistake me; I love my kids, they're wonderful children - smart, fun, funny, loving. But there are times, rrrrr...Saturday morning was chilly, but then, suddenly...the Sun emerged - Sun? Sun! OMFG, what the hell is THAT?!? It's the SUN!!! OH, Great Heat Tab in the Sky! You have returned to us! Ahhhh.....

So we opened the windows, did the laundry, swept the floors, played on the deck and argued about garden plans. Mojo and Missy went shopping. Peeper and I played Star Wars and I finished the woodwork - more about that later - and hung out in th - ahhhhh - Sun.

Then we napped (okay, Missy napped) and got ready to go to little Thor the Goddess of Thunder's 3rd birthday party.

Our girl's adoption siderunner is an incredibly terrific kid. She is growing up to be a happy, secure, fun and fun-loving little girl, for which I blame her parents, both terrific people theirownselves.We showed up prepared to enjoy the day and an enjoyable day it was, on whole.

Here's the gang ready to party like they were 1,095 days old!

Anyway, The 1899 House was lovely (especially with the cloudburst of pink and purple balloons), the homemade ice cream and cupcakes delicious. The company was lively, and the weather perfect.

Why did I come away feeling slightly blue?

Perhaps because it became increasingly obvious that, while they are friendly and polite to a fault, the Asgard family aren't really friends anymore. Friends in the sharing-things sense. Friends in the have-something-to-talk-about sense.They're aquaintences, yes. "Good aquaintences", if there is such a thing. People who, when you meet them, are warm and happy to see you and ask the right questions and tell you all the right things when you ask.

(oh, and for the record, the party is a great success when the Birthday Girl is under the table within an hour...actually, this is Miss Thor taking the shortcut past her auntie's and daddy's feet into the house for more b-day fun)

But who are also perfectly happy to NOT meet you for weeks, or months. They're - in dating terms - just not that into you. They have other friends who are more to their taste. It's not a bad thing, not a dislike thing, exactly...just...not so much.

And yesterday, I really saw that.

So while I like them and hope we see them again for Missy's 3rd in three weeks, I'm not expecting much. It is what it is. I just have to get over it and look to friends who are, well, more interested in hanging with...us, I suppose.Little Miss, by the way, was juuuust fine with that! She announced that she was having neither Thor nor her daycare diva rival Baby Ryan over for HER birthday. Mind you, Daddy did hint that the thing about having people over for you birthday was that they gave you presents. That brought a thoughtful look to her face. But she seems to see Thor as a rival rather than a potential friend.

Okay.

Here's the birthday girl with her daddy and grandpa. Whole lotta ove their, baby girl. Sweet.

So we're glad you loved your cocktail mixing set (we asked what a three-year-old wanted for her birthday and were told that anything food-y or games, or puzzles, would work. So we hit the Goodwill) and we hope you enjoy both the Speedy Alka-Seltzer ashtray/serving dish AND the Tickles the Tapeworm lunch box.Because we enjoyed celebrating your milestone.

But even with all the fun it wasn't all that long before we were all ice-creamed and cupcaked and played out. And it wasn't even dark yet. So home we went, to get our scooters and tricycles and rollerblades on, and scoot and skate and trike around the Astor School playground. And the a slow slide into jammies and stories and bed.

Nice. Nice day. And having "good aquaintences" - while it may not be all that as having good friends - isn't a bad thing. Better than not knowing these good folks at all. But I guess that the deal is accepting that what is, is.

As Ebby Calvin "Nuke" Laloosh would say: Sometimes you win. Sometimes, you lose.

Sometimes, it rains.

But not yesterday.Not yesterday.

Hey, hey; Happy Birthday, big girl.

Attrition

Not sure what to say other than I had to make a public acknowlegement of the many friends I've made...and are now slowly slipping away...through the strange and wonderful electronic intimacy of the internet.

It really hit home today, when I went to check in on some friends and their newly adopted sons and found that she is thinking of pulling herself in a little, retiring (or at least semi-retiring) her blog and connecting mostly through Facebook.

And she's right - the blogging takes time and energy that you just don't have after a long day of parenting. Or a long day of pretty much anything, but the little peeps in particular are special black holes of love and attention. There's no such thing as "too much". I manage because I spent the better part of twenty years going on four hours sleep a night for weeks at a time. I blog and blogread in the early mornings, or late at night, while my family is sleeping. I can understand completely the desire to pull yourself in, to restrict your confidence to the small group that you truly love, to devote the time to your close friends and family...and sleep!

I'm truly happy for her, and her husband, and their kids. It will be great for them, and for her.


When my grandfather was dying I was just a kid in school. I was frightened by death, and frightened by his appearance of age and sickness. So I asked him: aren't you scared? Aren't you sad?

My maternal grandfather was a very devout man, and I'm sure he'd thought a lot about his own death and the manner of his meeting it. And he was also a pastor, an "officer" in the Salvation Army, which is to say an ordained minister in an organization whose congregtion was the poor, the sick and the young. So he knew what to tell a scared kid.

Yes, he said, I'm a little scared, because I worry that it may hurt. And I don't want to leave your mom, or your Grandma, or you. But only a little.

And I'm not really sad, not for myself, because I hope and believe that I'm going to go on to a great adventure, to a place I've always hoped to see and never have. And because so many of my friends have already gone there, and I believe I'll see them again, and that makes me happy. The only thing I'm sad about is that I'll be leaving you, and you will be leaving me, for a long time. And I love you. And I'll miss you, and that makes me a little sad.

So I missed my Grandpa when he died, and tried not to be sad. But he was gone, and I loved him, and I missed him. And I would never be able to see and hear and talk to him the same way ever again.

The thing is, this friend, and other friends I've made through adoption, are "out there" on Facebook. I'll spare you a rant on Facebook, I've said my piece and it's not worth rehashing. But suffice to say that for me Facebook after blogging is like going to My Brother's Barbeque and getting a fucking McRib. It's like only being able to talk to my friends about shoes, or baseball, or crocheting. I can talk to them, but it was like "talking" to my Grandpa in prayer, the way my Grandma suggested. It just wasn't the same. There's always somebody else on the line giving someone a mojito or becoming a fan of the Most Bestest ABBA Cover Band Evah!

Mmmm.

So another friend begins to slip away from the blogiverse, seperated by time and distance and the lack of one and the excess of another. So C, I know you'll be making more time for yourself and your DH and your adorable little guys and that makes you happy, and well it should. The only thing I'm sad about is that I'll be leaving you, and you will be leaving me, for a long time. And I love you. And I'll miss you, and that makes me a little sad.

Walking Wounded

Mojo is off spa-ing with her sis overnight and I'm here with the kids. Peep wanted to sleep in the big bed with me and, in a moment of weakness, I agreed.

Thing is, the Peeper sleeps like a mad clog dancer, rolling and kicking; it's not uncommon to go in to his room in the morning and find him turned 180 degrees from where he started the evening before, or crossways, contorted like a yogi. He's a busy little guy, even in his sleep.

So about 2a.m. he kicked me awake. I shuffled into the head, ignored the cats' frantic entreaties and padded downstairs, through Missy's unfinished bedroom and past Mojo's bike and the old dining table being Varathaned in the stairwell to the computer, to read, write and think.

Among the electronic social calls I made was one to a friend who lives in the southcentral U.S. She is where we were about this time last year; her adoption is in sight, she's edging in a little, getting a bit jittery and excited. Nesting. All the mommy things that mommies do. Part of the process she has documented on her blog - it's password protected so I won't link to it. It's been fun and exciting to watch her slowly ramp up out of the hard winters' depression into hope and anticipation. So I expected to enjoy her latest post with unqualified attention as I have recently. It featured a short essay written by a friend of hers about "prosperity consciousness". Not something I was aware of, but the gist is apparently that instead of hoping for something, you actively prepare for the Good Thing you want. As she puts it:

"...it’s not wishing for your Good to show up. It’s not hoping your Good will show up. It’s expectancy…a knowing, if you will. When you ask for something in your life, it’s KNOWING that it is on the way. When I ask for something I want, I always use the phrase ‘this or something better.’"

I think that's where I froze in my chair, bottle of water halfway raised, the old, sick feeling seeping out of the place in the back of my head where I keep it when I'm awake, while my busy, gibbering forebrain yammered at it: "No! Goddam it, stop it, go away! Not again, you bastard...!" And I stared at the inert letters, bible black on the white screen and realized that my friend's friend's optimistic hope had triggered, yet again, the little claymore mine that age and sorrow has tripwired into my brain.

Stephen Sondheim wrote "Every day a little death;/In the parlor, in the bed/In the curtians, in the silver/In the buttons, in the bread. Every day a little sting;/In the heart and in the head/Every move and every breath/And you hardly feel a thing/Brings a perfect little death."

I can't think of many better ways that describe the journey from birth to grave: every day we move through a neverending cascade of changes, arrivals and departures, joys and sorrows and the tepid moments between, hoping for the best, fearing the worst, doing the best we can as we see it.

And along the way we enjoy overflowing moments of happiness, moments we hold and try to preserve like flowers pressed in a book, willing the color and joy never to fade.

And other moments hold perfect horror. The sudden weightless step over the abyss; the swooping rising of your guts that signals the end of hope, the swerveless descent towards the inescapable crash below.

The loss of a child is one of those moments.

And it, too, remains pressed between the leaves of your memory. Even long afterwards, when you think you have passed beyond its sight, you turn a humdrum corner, you open an unremarkable door, and there It is. Grinning its blind skull-grin, cozening you forward to peer into that long-closed grave.

"Mmmmmmyeah, remember? There's that little onesie you loved so much. There you are celebrating her first kick. There's the soccer ball you imagined booting around with her. Hurts, doesn't it? Thought so."

The thing is...this isn't something that, for most of us, dominates our lives. It's not the mark of Cain, forever branding and exiling us from other people and other joys. I don't want pity or sorrow. My daughter's death is part of my life, one strand in the colorful weft of my time here on Earth. It's not the loss of my mind, or my sight. It's just a thing, like the big scar on my right thumb where I put my hand through the storm door when I was seven. A scar. Another scar.

What occured to me while writing this (because I'm thinking about the "Decisive Battle" I missed for July, Gettysburg - I'll blog about that this week) was a comment I read about Lee's lieutenant Dick Ewell, whose disappointing performance on the Confederate left drew much criticism at the time as well as afterwards. Said the commentator: "Something appears to have deserted Ewell after the loss of his left leg; some men never really recover their spirit after suffering big wounds."

I realize anew reading "We must never limit the universe." from my friend's blog that what this old grief scar does do IS limit my universe. I'm perfectly functional, but I've taken the big wound. I can't ever again KNOW that something good is on the way. Because it was once and what arrived was pain and loss and sorrow. And nothing I could do - and I once foolishly said that anything that wanted to hurt my family would have to kill me first - was enough to stop the awful emptiness that still exists, a tiny universe of nothing but Dark Matter, in the locked room at the top of the stairs in the back of my head.

So I hope and plan to celebrate my friends new child(ren, I hope). But, as with everything else, as I do I will hold in my heart the tiny, cold, sharp, shard of the old pain that rides behind me through life and holds over my head the derisive crown of lost fatherhood and whispers in my ear the reminder that life, and love, and happiness, are best enjoyed today, now, for like glory they are fleeting...

"If we fall in the race, though we win,
the hoof-slide is scarred on the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin,
remaineth for ever Remorse."
R.K.