Outdoors…
…and in.
Archive | March, 2010
Road trippin’
The first in what’s sure to be a fitful spring break travelogue. Â Who knows — this may be the first and last entry. Â But right now I got WiFi and an eddy of time as my daughter makes a windsock in the hotel’s kid’s club! Â While the beloved reconnointers the beach with the boy child and her dear friend & said friend’s family.
Basically, Holy Crap, is all I can say. Â Yes, I hardly get out, and yes, this is our first time in a hotel with our kids. Â And it was chosen by the beloved’s dear friend, whom we met here. Â She (a) also has kids and (b) has been here before and has given it the stamp of approval. Â Apparently, people do stuff like this.
Weekend bonus shot, 03.28.10
And now for something completely different.
For this weekend bonus shot, not B&W, not even a still picture.  Video, shot on a pocket point & shoot camera by an old friend on the fly, practically on the sly. About four random (to me, beautiful) minutes on a sunny  Sunday afternoon in spring.
The boy child was doing a duet with his Mama: she on piano (and vocals), he on guitar. Which looks suspiciously  like a feather duster.  Also he wanders off midway through to go fetch some other sheet music.  I was impressed that he turned it right side up.
So very often I think to myself, “If only those haters drunk on that hatorade could just sit down and truly bear witness to any ordinary moment of our lives — ones like these, for instance; totally random, yet as representational as any other — they’d have to think differently. Wouldn’t they? How can this not simply mean: love? And therefore: good.”
I know, I know. Â Still, a gal can hope. Matter of fact, sensibly or no, hope springs eternal.
On top o’ the world
Which, in the lil’ peanut’s world, equals: zoo train.
He waved enthusiastically at everyone we passed by.  At least 33% waved back. Unalloyed unselfconsciousness: the double-edged, enviable, indomitable power of the three year-old.
When the zoo train took its San Francisco Bay view loop, all us grown ups were casting our eyes out across the beautiful, wind-swept vista. Â Meanwhile our kids kept a steady bead on the bushes in their emu /wallabee lookout.
Five years
E.U.P. • February 27, 1995 — March 24, 2005.
[I posted the photograph above and the poem below for the past two years on this date. Â Most of the explanatory text below, last year too.
Muted backstory about my nephew here (I provided an anchor link to the relevant part, but it seems to not be working).
I continue to find it near impossible to write here in public about my nephew, the flesh and blood boy, much less about his illness and death. Though I will mark this day this way. Slightly more possible has been my attempt to describe the mark his joie de vivre, coupled with his illness and death, has left on my parenthood. Â About which, some here, and here.
At some level this whole blog is a paean to him insofar as it is an extended sign of my attempt to live my life and my parenthood with eyes and heart as wide open as possible, and to grab as many people by the lapels as I can, and urge them to do the same. Â For this enduring parting gift, my gratitude to him continues to be oceanic.]
“When Death Comes”
by Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems
We’re here, we’re queer, etc.
Anyone who reads stuff online, particularly LGBT thinky stuff, will surely have seen treatment of the census topic and we invisible/ blurry/ quizzical/ perpetually misread LGBT people.
Still, I thought I’d aid and abet. Â I got my notice from our daughter’s public school some time ago, saying the census would be coming, and that as a family we should be sure to be counted.
Har! Not our family! Â At least not without the cunning strategy most folks are directing toward their tax returns this time of year. I prepared to be irritated.
I also sent away for my handy-dandy “Queer the Census” sticker which I will happily affix to the envelope, with no particular certainty as to its impact on anything more than the schlepp who opens the envelopes.  But at least the schlepp will see that we’re organized, and that many of us are peeved enough to plaster the exterior of our census forms with a gi-normous pink sticker. (I’ve been running a link for it down in the little LGBT civil rights aisle of the sidebar there for months, but if you read this in a Google reader or something, you’ve been missing out. Git yers here!)
- Lesbian Dad: And now, a bit of Mr. Sendak in his own words. ...
- Lesbian Dad: Mama, you made perfect sense. My own shoulders dow...
- rev2bebt: Ah, yes, but in New York City, if you actually loo...
- Solitary Diner: What a gorgeous building. I used to be hesitant a...
- Lesbian Dad: I can't tell you all how deeply I appreciate his ...
- Weekend bonus shot (Tuesday edition), 01.17.12 | Lesbian Dad: [...] It is the law of love that rules mankind [.....
20 questions, answered now at BlogHer too
Go read it there, if you hadn’t here, or if you had here and never got around to making that comment you wanted to, comment there! The really interesting thing is that the reading audience is extremely broad. Â No pun intended. Â So the conversation can be productive and illuminating in whole new ways.