Wedding Bells

So yesterday was the wedding--the kids, the ring bearer and flower girl. I'm too tired to post anything beyond a brief re-cap of the day so here it is...

 Phoenix's idea of being a flower girl was to grab huge handfuls of petals, chuck them on the floor, and then stomp on them. Meanwhile, Fisher was coaching her to toss more or not enough.

 When she saw me at the end she tossed the whole damn basket and took off for me, while Fisher was left to point out her mistake. They were utterly adorable.

 With cousins. This girl has all of them wrapped around her pinky finger.

 Sibling love.

 Fisher was thrilled that his suit pockets were deep enough to allow him to bring bigfoot along for the day. And if anyone had a problem with that here's his middle finger.

 Ready for the long day ahead. And it was. They stuck it out for 12 hours and even at the end of the night, long pass their normal bedtime, they were dishing their moves on the dance floor. Phoenix kept running into the crowd of people that fringed the dance floor and tugging on their hands to come join. The life of the party, that girl. 

There are no words for this cuteness.

Randoms

Driving home at sunset last night on a country road my 4 year old Fisher had this to say: why do all the people and houses and corn and grass and trees eat the sun...the blood of the sun. And minutes later, you think up your dream and the more you think the more it grows. I'm raising a thinker here. Often when we're driving he's so quiet, staring hard out the window and so I'll ask him what he's thinking about. Sometimes he'll wait a while to answer, as if not wanting to break the line of this thoughts, and when he does answer it blows me away, catches my heart. He and Phoenix are in their aunt Kelly's wedding today (ring bearer and flower girl), so last night was the rehearsal. Here's a hint of how that went:

The always-up-or-a-party-never-follow-authority Phoenix, and Fisher the thinker. 

I'm sure I mentioned in some other post that the best starry sky I have seen was in Pecos Valley, but just this morning I remembered the one that trumps it. I was on the Island of Caye Caulker off Belize eating dinner with my feet in the sand when the power went out on the entire island. No man-made light pollution for miles and miles. It was like sitting in an open-air cave--so black, and the only light at all in that world was the bowl of stars above. 30 minutes passed like this, and when the lights flickered back in their exposing way I started talking to the owner of the restaurant where I was seated. He had been a high power suit on wall street and took a rare vacation to the island some years back. He decided he liked the person he was on that island more than the person he was in NYC, so he quit his job and moved there. I admire people like this--people who take risks to live by their own time and not the whims of society.

It's odd that I think the water from the bathroom faucet tastes different than the one in the kitchen. Amazing how our views can change our tastes even when the product is the same.

What Our Names Mean

Here's one of my father's classic jokes--so there's this woman named Sally Lipshits and she decided to change her name. Do you know what she changed it to? Suzy Lipshits. It's funny how names seem to own a person, as if there is some requirement that comes with them. A roll we fill without even knowing it. My name means brave and I suppose I am and have been all my life whether I wanted to or not. I knew a guy who only ever dated girls named Jennifer. It's not like he went around asking people their names and upon meeting a Jennifer, pursuing her. He'd just have some attraction only to find out after that her name was...Jennifer. Clearly people named Jennifer have a certain personality he's drawn to. Every Greg I have ever met is easy-going, almost impossible to anger. What a strange thing--that we become the meaning of our names. It's the same with horoscopes, a phenomenon that occurs before we are aware of what it means. I'm a Libra and all my life I have sought balance--long before I knew what a horoscope was. It seems almost preposterous, impossible that the month we are born to defines our personalities in any way at all. But it does. It's as if whatever goes on in the ever is playing some joke on us, or else giving us some nudge, a hint that there is some energy beyond our knowing that is so great as to make us predestined to be a certain type. And the world needs all kinds. If only we could figure out a way to work together.

On Irrational Thinking

The other day the kids and I were walking through our neighborhood and Fisher, pointing to one of the lawns, said "they should mow their grass because if there was a really short person they wouldn't be able to see over it enough to walk through." The grass was about 6 inches high. I told him he was very thoughtful. Kids make the best poets don't they, because they believe that anything is possible. They believe in dreams, can convince themselves of anything, can look at a wall and assume it could disappear, can think that a sharp rock is really a dinosaur claw and they need to start digging for its bones right here, right now. They haven't heard no enough ways to keep them from that kind of magic thought. The remnants of our childhood minds lives on in us as irrational thoughts. And maybe irrational doesn't have to be a negative word. It could also mean playful absurdity. I still run up basement stairs two at a time because I used to believe some boney-ghost like hand was trying to capture my ankles. And I'm not ashamed of this. There's a certain softness in this kind of thinking isn't there--makes the world less rigid. Sometimes instead of always trying to figure out the meaning of things we should follow the line of this playful absurdity because who really knows anything and why not let yourself grow soft.

Re-cap

I didn't post yesterday because I was driving home from Minneapolis, at one point following a car with SOBSTRY on their license plates, where I was awed by the performance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at First Ave and where I had the following encounters...
My buddy from grad school, Derek Tellier (Tellier for short) and I had a drink and eats before the show. Sitting next to us on a patio was a guy with a camera and so I asked him what kind of pictures he like to take. His answer was portraits and that the thing he loves about photography is the control and capture of time. He's all about the mechanics of photography having grown up under the hood of a car. He used to love speed. That changed when he was in a car accident--flipping end over end 4 times. I asked him what went through his mind then and he said it was just a pause and then I am alive. He was fine, but now he prefers to  slow things down. I wonder if he does so because he is forever trying to capture that moment where his life paused--to live in that space that is so like the moment frozen in the click of a camera. Then we talked about the cruelty of the world--me trying to explain that the cruelty can be an awakening gift and it's just a matter of perspective and then we left and I'll never see him again.

Standing out front of First Ave, I noticed one of the stars read Lifter Puller. Never heard of them and what an odd name I said to Tellier. At that moment a girl passed by and said hey, they're my friends! She gave me their story.

Karen O rocked the show, played my favorite songs, wore an awesome Jackson 5 shirt, and got the crowd keyed up, my chest fisting and swelling with the thrill of it all. Someone, noticing my friend's bear claw necklace, told him if I were you I would totally wear that. And on our way out I saw a guy wearing a suit, which I complimented. He said thanks, it's like wearing pajamas. He'd just gotten off a flight from London where he had the best weekend of his life and he wanted to be cozy on the flight. Then he left to try to make out with Karen O.

We went to a rooftop deck after the show and chatted with some more suits--two gentlemen with ties tossed over their shoulders as if some great wind blew, shoes off, feet propped up on the ledge, toasting the Blackhawks Stanley Cup win. Then we walked to the sculpture park and took some pictures before getting kicked out and taking a taxi back to Tellier's. I had been up for nearly 24 hours, capturing as much time as I could fit before my eyes shut.

A Poem on a Monday

Here are some more photos taken by the lovely Tana...

And what Monday would be complete without a poem. Since last night marked the peak of the supermoon--even though rain here prevented us from viewing it--I'll include one of my own poems that includes the moon image. Have I mentioned before that I wake up most days around 4 am? There is nothing like waking up to the stars and feeling like you have the whole town to yourself--it gives my days center, a kind of secret gift. Everything in this poem is true.

I Wake With the Stars

Yesterday a dozen owls rounding the tree top air

in the still-dark. Their quiet diving and lone hooting

took root so that all day their presence bloomed. Now

the moon is the color of a peach and huge, sinking

over the hills as a claim to beginnings – its light

illuminates the table and I think now the table

is the moon and of course now I am

the moon. The things we carry.

My daughter Phoenix sings of clouds.

I want to be in a cloud, she says. I want to fly

but I don’t have wings. And because she’s two

she adds maybe someday. Because I am a mother,

because I carry a moon inside my ribs – because

I’m trying to embrace the thought that surrendering

to joy doesn’t mean the world will come

crashing down – I say yes, someday, and I believe it.

Casey Lord

Full Moon

I know scientists have debunked the theory that a full moon affects human behavior, but tell that to a poet or to anyone working in an ER or anyone with kids and they'll say the scientific proof doesn't matter. People go batty in the hours surrounding a full moon and maybe science just hasn't figured out the right way to explain it. And would it even matter if they could? It's no question the moon affects the ocean's tides--but aren't our own bodies comprised of 58% of water, and even more than that in children. We carry an ocean inside us. When the full moon presses down on us with more gravity than usual how could it not stir our biological processes? And beyond that is the fact that what we see around us becomes a part of us. To look at the moon then is to bring it inside and everything has its own energy. Perhaps even images we bring to mind carry their own kind of weight that unfurl in our bodies. Perhaps we carry around the essence of everything we've seen.

I was thinking about this phenomenon last week--before I even knew that the supermoon would be appearing over this weekend--for the simple fact that my kids were driving me nuts. They were like tiny bats stuck in a box--flickering about, unsettled, cagey, extra rowdy. My first thought--a full moon. And I remember a time some months ago when both kids kept tripping over the tiniest things. It was preposterous how often they fell down over the course of that week and I told a friend that it was as if the earth was off its axis. Their reply to me was that it was. It was strange and comical to witness the difference in my kids' stumbling feet--to think how something so vast and inconceivable as the world could manifest itself in something as small as a child's gait. A phenomenon so small one could put it in their pocket. I've never had a brain for science because I think beauty isn't meant to be calculated and measured but felt and wondered about. I'll take the metaphor over the numbers.

In honor of the supermoon, here's one of my favorite passages from a moon poem (titled "Returning From an Artist's Studio" by the great Stephen Dunn):
"Late at night in my own life / I see fireflies scintillating a field / and a fullish moon up there working / on its reputation, which I thought / was secure. And though I'm not one / to stop my car for beauty / I stop, get out, begin to understand / how the first stories winked / of another world. It's as if / I'm witness to some quiet carnival / of the gods, or the unrisen dead / speaking in code."