Alwyn Court, W58th & 7th, New York, New York.

Above image apropos of nothing much in particular, except that I walked by this confectionary extravaganza yesterday on a stroll after work with a colleague and friend (known on the internet as Mr. Lady: that we’re now working together is indeed fitting, since her “handle” is such a nifty complement to Lesbian Dad).

And yep, I’m not a’tall shy about stopping and craning my neck and photographing gothic outbursts like this (got its own NYT article plus a Wikipedia entry). Just one of the manifold benefits of being so far into one’s forties that one is lapping up at the edge of fifty (yep: this is what almost-fifty looks like).  As a younger pup in this photogenic town, I kept the camera lens trained in front of me, oftentimes from the midst of a big-ass crowd, at a sea of queer folk marching in the street with or without permit (as yet still consigned to slides, else they’d make regular appearances here).  Now I point my lens 360 degrees, tourist-style, and I just don’t even care who takes notice.

~~~

A day late, in honor of Dr. King, some past posts here in recognition:

• Weekend bonus shot, 01.17.10
• A King among men
• It is the law of love that rules mankind

The above image of my Pops is from a coupla five years back, which would have made him a spry, debonair 86.

Yesterday he turned 91. In our morning chat, which usually takes place on cell phone as I walk, he is having a harder and harder time making out various words. This morning it was “thrifty.”

Me (concluding a reference to something): “I felt really thrifty.”
Him: “You felt really chesty?!”
Me: “No, thrifty!”
Him: “Risky?!”
Me: “Thrifty! I felt thrifty!”
Him: “Ruskie?!”

In recent years we both seem to have enjoyed the frequently preposterous variations he puts on mis-heard words. Or rather, the variations provided to him by his beleaguered, four-score-and-way more than seven years-old cochlea(s), which have been slowly and certainly  giving up the ghost and throwing him just any old homonym that strolls along.  He’s been taking a running jump at this swap a mis-heard word for most hilarious and unlikely homonym for years now. Nowadays, the mis-heard words number into larger and larger percentages of the conversation.

I would have begun to spell it out for him, which I usually do when we don’t make it out by the third variation. That usually works, though there’s no guarantee we won’t wend our way down another rabbit trail, since I have to come up with words for the letters. Never having trainied in the international radio telephony alphabet, I take it as another opportunity for mirth-making and derailment, which of course he’s all in on (“R” as in Rasputin! “U” as in urchin! “S” as in sesquipedalian! and so on).

This morning, alas, there was no time to spell.  I had arrived at my place of employ.

Me: “Pops, I’m at work now, I gotta go. We’re going to just have to leave it at Ruskie.”
Him: “Anything you say, doll.”
Me: “Main thing for you to hear is, I love you and have a great Thursday, Pops.” (followed by “mwah” kissing sound)
Him: “Mwah to you too, sweetie.”

Loud and clear.

I watch him go through these doors to his apartment in the retirement community so long and hard now. Used to be he’d turn and wave and shamble off, only looking back once to wave me away (‘gwan now, doll; go home).

Now, stooped by his ninety-one years (this Wednesday), he turns and looks over and over again.  And so do I.

Fairy house-building near the West Fork of the Carson River, Hope Valley, CA.

Her operating assumption, and who am I to doubt it: everywhere  you go, there are fairies who would appreciate a home.

His first sentence, Hope Valley, CA.

Behold, above, my boy’s first sentence (beyond a great number of “I [heart symbol] U Baba” sentences, each of which I have kept on their various scraps of paper).  The scatological cant of this one, while a touch wince-inducing, cannot diminish my pride in his literary and comic prowess.

We are back now to civilization and our work in it, after a week in the state’s least populous county, up in the Sierra Nevada, utterly sans internet, cell phone reception, or even movies on a TV!  Folks, these places exist, and I highly recommend them for periodic purges of digital and media detritus. We were fortunate enough to be staying in a cabin its proprietors call Harmony House, situated at the eastern edge of  Hope Valley. A perfectly named spot from which to launch what we all hope will be a splendid new year.  My predictions, if it in any way resembles last year: full, busy, challenging. Also rewarding, fulfilling, and an honor to be around to be a part of.

Hope your last year ended splendidly, and that this one began full of promise.

“Christmas Lullaby,” by Jason Robert Brown, eavesdropped after dinner early December last year. [Ed note: Once you start the video, double-clicking the image expands it to full screen, a decidedly mixed blessing since then you get more jostled by my improv'ed lo-tech iPhone cinematography.]

I couldn’t help but re-run this sweet gem which I first posted a year ago. Still sweet, still–with the exception of the diapers on the boy–true.  Love to all who reads and listens here.

We’ve been here before. (Back then, when she was two, and again then, at two and a half. Clearly it’s a thing for me: I just counted over half a dozen “carousel”-referential posts here.)

We come to Tilden Park’s Christmas Spectacular (ok, official title is “Fantasy,” but we rotate its name for fun) more or less annually, since she and her brother began to be big enough to not be overwhelmed by a carousel.  Okay, since they were old enough for me to not be overwhelmed by the prospect of holding their wee bodies on a moving zoo animal on a carousel.

We’ll be back every single year, until the youngest of them can no longer grasp enough of a wisp of his childhood self to enjoy the ride.

I really don’t know what to expect with these people. When they reach the tween verge, and the tug-of-war with their past and future intensifies, what will they do with these childish things? They are so full now, with such easy access to a wisdom most would attribute to advanced years, and an equally easy access to a weightless imaginativeness most would attribute to extreme youth.

What I want is for them to continue to hold that paradox, all the while being fully immersed in their present. À la the reformed Scrooge, who, at the end of his three-directional hell ride, vowed to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!”

A gal can, and does, dream.

Next time around it smacked Baba in the kisser. That’ll learn me to pay attention.

To wit (re: paying attention): I’ll be untethered from ye olde internet next week. Digital Sabbatical time, thank you GwenBell et al.!  Clarity, monotasking parenthood, and board games all shimmer like palm trees at a distant oasis.  Between now and the oasis: a bit of extendo family revelry, cooking a feast for a dozen, and the kids’ favorite holiday.  I can think of a few ways I could be more fortunate (one, two, three, maybe four more loved ones alive now that should be; rifts bridged; wounds healed).  Other than that, my cup runneth over.

She fits in my lap, barely, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting to cuddle there, nor does it stop me from hoisting her there and doing all I can to hold and preserve, ’til she’s ready to get up.

The bittersweetness of her disappearing childhood–gradual, utterly inescapable–is a taste she knows as well or better than do her mother and I.

Because she is so adept at putting her feelings into words, we know the acuteness of her awareness. She hears her mama’s or my casual reference to something she used to do when she was a baby, or watches her little brother play with a toy that was once hers (and now, for good reason, is no longer), and it all comes back in a rush: the longing for her own, lost, younger self.

And yet that feeling, powerful though it is when it comes, is wedged right next to its opposite: an insatiable appetite for new knowledge, longer words, more complex keys to vaster mysteries.  The grown-up girl-sounding statements, pronounced as much to hear what they sound like coming out of her mouth as for anything else.

She lurches forward, swirls backward, glides ahead, and then stops again and looks back, hand at her brow, shielding her vision from the bright light of the inevitable.

Sisters, very long ago, Castro Valley, CA. [Mod from an original image by David Rae Morris.]