My Brother Came To Visit Me

Daniel and Andrea drove five hours, through one hour long traffic jam, one broke-down water pump, a loaner car from friends, two hours at a garage in Williamston Michigan just to be with us.

We got a corner booth at our favorite -- Gateway to India tonight -- the circle-y corner kind of booth, and got completely high on spices and nan and lassi and funny stories and great conversation.

And this at the end of one of the most beautiful windy days in October. Enough yellow pine needles fell from the 21 White Pines in our yard to maybe, possibly account for the astonishing yellow glow of the waning moon.

I had a cup of Moroccan Mint Green Tea because tea before bed has been creating these incredibly detailed, bizarre and telling dreams lately.

So I'm happy and I wish you the same....

peace~

Finally Halloween Costumes for Any Kid...

and so very of-the-moment

watching the eclipse

I watched the Lunar Eclipse two nights ago on the telephone with my family. It was forty something degrees and so it was ridiculous to be standing on the formerly front steps of our house in my bare feet and a white undershirt.

I still wear white undershirts because My dad taught me to. My dad taught me to wear white undershirts under my dress shirts and he taught me to tie full windsor knots on my ties, also how to polish my own shoes. And though i wear blue jeans most days and dress shirts and suitcoats from decades that have been long gone, I am still, believe it or not, fastidious about tying my tie knots well, keeping my shoes relatively shiny and wearing white undershirts under all of my t-shirts. I am also keenly aware that these habits make me a kind of relic, but I'm a nostalgic guy and October is Nostalgia Month, so...

The eclipse two nights ago was more like a celebration of the arc of a whole life bound up in the moon on one night. We walked around the carefully manicured walking path at Jackson Park with Jaelyn adn Addison. I chilled with them at the playground while Lynn raced around the perimeter, tucking her three miles into the end of a busy day. As we walked West toward the playground the end of the sunset was so blinding that we squinted and tried to ignore where we were going, Looking at our feet or each other instead. By the time the night was over, an almost full moon, white and huge was dangling just above the horizon.

"It's like a big Light Bulb!" wondered Addison. And we watched it out the side and front of the minivan as it beckoned us back to Casacommunitas.

Marianne and I somehow got on the topic of Pot Lucks from the good old days in Baptist Church Basements and Recreation Centers. I observed that there weren't so many casseroles at the pot lucks at our Akron Christian Reformed Church -- was this a denominational difference? She didn't think so; she described the changing landscape of Pot Lucks at the church I attended as a teenager.

"I'm noticing a lot of buckets of chicken, vegetables and salads bought whole at local grocery stores. You know," she said, "Someone should probably write a paper on this." (write a paper? I think: that's the kind of solution that I usually offer...anything vaguely interesting that ever emerges at an academics party -- immediately gets relegated to a probably-good-paper topic...The really great parties render books)

"It's a travesty." I agree, "Everyone knows that if you don't bring your food in a corningware dish and if there aren't melty-burned-y marks on the side where the food has sealed a covenant between your kitchen and the church community, that YOU SHOULDN'T BRING IT to the potluck.

"I'm thinking someone could go back to school and do sociological studies of potlucks...."she's dangling it in front of me like a thick juicy worm, "What do these events say about us? You could write another thesis."

"It's true," I confess, "I never liked any work so much as graduate school." I'm salivating by this time, but not over chicken and egg and creamy noodle casserole memories -- but about the possibilities of tracing:

upward mobility and globablization and the shifts of family structure

and in my Human Subjects Review Board Clearanance Documents I would describe my research methodologies:

I will stand in long snaking lines around the perimeters of cement block rooms with tile floors, waiting eagerly toward the fold-up tables covered in the culinary evidence of the collective values and coherence. I will mark my own role as participant observer with the thick nuance of performative richness that my informants embody. In our lines we will clutch our plastic silverware and our compartmentalized plastic plates and we will try to distinguish the smells hovering and blending above us in the air. I will cast a jealous eye with my neighbors toward Hazel Priest's mini-slow-cooker; wondering whether enough of her swedish meatballs will still be there by the time arrive. I will speculate aloud with my co-participants crafting theories that estimate how many meatballs might be in that small pot and how social norms will limit the number that most of the parishioners before us will allow themselves to pile on their plates, and how many people will repudiate those norms to take a bigger helping? and how many of those people are in line before us? And if we don't get meatballs is it really worth our while to wait this long?

The moon is swallowed at first by a greyish shadow of us. Hard to believe that that brilliant light can be so dulled by another little celestial orb 864,000 miles away. And then the greyish shadow turns into something more like a milky yellow. Which I like better. Yellow is my favorite color for nostalgic light and the disappearance of the moon tonight seems like a nostalgic occasion.

I've thus far convinced Daniel and Ryan and my Mom and Marianne to come outside and watch the eclipse with me. They are all 300 miles away from me in Michigan, but the distance is eclipse by this little cell phone which will, itself, later in the conversation fade like a waning moon. But Marianne stays on the line with me until we are both cold but the moon is eventually swallowed by the shadow of us. It turns purple and orange and every other unbelievable color or a bruise healing slowly. No matter how many lunar eclipses I live to see, I will never stop being astonished by this final moment in the process. The moon as a dark shining bruise dangling above the stark branches of late October Maple Trees.

The porch steps which used to lead from the front door of our house down to a little road next to a park are cold and I go inside. Some developer in the early 1950's decided to remove that road and suddenly, randomly, the back and side of our house became the front. Her majestic front porch opened to a wide stairway and a sidewalk which dead ends eventually into a wide ball of Burning Bushes, still pink and fiercely red with Autumn.

What is the distance between the selves we are now and the person we were then? Half an acre and an absent road? 300 or 864,000 miles? Or should we measure the light from the past that still eminates from who we are now? Brilliant as a white bulb? Shadowy and grey? Yellow and soft?

Or maybe our memories are a beautiful bruise that we live through like lunar light...

The Good Old Days

If you happened to know me back when I made the series of video shorts entitled: Things That Seldom Happen But Would Be Hilarious If They Ever Did, and appreciated said video series, should definitely make their way over to the Yankee Pot Roast to read about the how we can use our training from back in the good old days -- to solve workplace problems today. I got several genuine guffaws out of it. Really. (And "several guffaws" is good for me.)

For those of you who didn't know me during the making of the series -- lets be honest -- the punchline is pretty much given away in the title. Brendon gave a nuanced performance in a laundry basket, but otherwise I'd have to say that the post over at Yankee Pot Roast is funnier.

cue the Spiders Moths & Mice...

Recently, I know that I'm tired -- that I literally haven't been getting enough sleep -- when I'm reading something and all of the sudden in the top of my peripheral vision I see a mouse scurry by.

Or sometimes a moth will fly very close to my face. Or an airplane will mysteriously fly just by my window. or a spider will dangle near the top of my upper eyelid.

It's so Donnie Darko - big pink rabbit.

I suppose that this could be a sign of an impending stroke...I have no medical evidence to suggest this, but it just seems like that kind of symptom.

Of course an option that I prefer is that these ripples at the edge of reality are a *sign* that I'm about to moved into a stage of new insight. You know, like I"m going to get the spiritual gift of astrology or my dreams are going to light up with tomorrows NASDAQ.

oops there goes one now...

The athlete formerly known as....

On Saturday Addison announced that he was no longer Addison. He would now be known as "Malone."

So:

ME: Addison, you have to eat the crusts on your bread.

He just looks at me with this impatient, tight-lipped stare. So serious that (from a three year old) it is absurd.

ME: You have to eat them.

ADDISON: I *not* addison.

ME: I'm sorry. Malone, you have to eat the Crusts of your bread.

He acquieses happily, starts to eat his crusts (unlike, if I may derail, the episode of the cold mushy carrots that dragged on for two hours tonight), and smile winningly at me.

ME: So I never get to call you Addison again?

ADDISON: No!

ME: Never?

ADDISON: NO! I still will be Addison, just not NOW! (as if such rules had been handed out on three by five cards to everyone while iw as out of the room and how could I have missed them!?)

Lynn adapts to such shifts in identity much more fluidly than I. Several hours later she calls onto the playporch:

LYNN: Jaelyn, Malone, I want you to clean up your papers.

Addison whirls around in his chair -- he's sporting the exasperated impatient look again.

ADDISON: I not Malone anymore!

LYNN: So what do we call you?

ADDISON: Just "Honey."

LYNN: Okay. Honey and Jaelyn can you clean up the papers and the glue and the sisscors.

ADDISON: YOU (!) not my mommy . YOu not call me honey. Only JaeJae call me honey! She's my mommy!

LYNN: Okay, just clean up the glue. Both of you. Honies, Malones, whoever....

But as she returms to the kitchen, Addison chases her back in:

ADDISON: I'm still Malone when I'm playing soccer.

LYNN: Okay. Got it. Cool, Malone.

Exasperation again. Does he have to get our a flannelgraph board for us?

ADDISON: I NOT playing soccer right now.

and he runs, a little disgusted, back to the playporch to pick up his glue & papers.

world vibe

we had a great conversation at home group last night around something that Steve had picked up somewhere.

Somebody (if you know who, please email / comment me) suggested that the metaphor of "worldview" was particularly unhelpful because of how it relied upon the experience of sight; apparently they suggested that an auditory metaphor would work much better.

I've been more than a little miffed at the "worldview" talk for the last few years, and I'm delighted with the possibilities that this language / metaphor provides.

To me, the idea of "worldview" denotes a sort of stable coherent vision of the world which contradicts all of the norms of perception, movement, peripheral vision, focus. It also privileges the intentional worldview thinker as a sort of conquering visionary. Once you know or understand your worldview -- you can look at anything and understand it according to your stable-coherent-vision-of-the-world. That seems to be to preclude the possibility of insight or development...(even if some of those effects are derived from the metaphor in ways that do not reflect the norms of the "worldview" discourse)

The downside? "Calling" as a metaphor -- which I (as you know) gave up recently -- works well in this paradigm.

But so does the concept of recognizing a particular refrain -- listening for loops or samples from some well-loved tune -- attending to a contrapuntal melody -- marching to the beat of a different drum -- finding truth by juxtaposing a suprising melody with an unexpected rhythm -- hearing the same tune played by many different instruments...