Floral artist

My son in law, a big data brainiac who has both an engineering and business grad degrees to his name, has a flower venture of some sort in his future, mark my words. His cousin's girlfriend, a studio photographer, gave him a free photo shoot as a birthday gift, so that he'll be all set when he starts his floral art business, whatever form that takes, and needs head shots and other images for his website. This young man with an engineer's crisply logical mind turns out to have the soul of an artist when it comes to flowers, and his loved ones get to bask in the beauty of that. That shot is one of my favorites from the photo shoot.

July album

Here are some pictures from the past month of my son and his wife, in photos they sent me from their recent trip out west, first to a wedding in Grand Rapids, North Dakota (yes, they are continuing their impressive round of weddings, this was their fifth friend to get married this year, coming off of five weddings last year and seven the year before), followed by a few days of vacation in Seattle, then quick visit to friends in Portland, the ones whose wedding they attended in Milan, Italy last year. I love it when my beloveds go exploring and send me pictures along the way so I can see they're okay and happy and I can live vicariously through them and know that the world is theirs, too.

My 'seventies-souled nephew, Walking Eagle, is dropping new music soon, and I'm definitely vibing with this mood as a possible album cover.

And how could I not share this photo posted in the family chat of the coolest little mini Leisa on the planet. I'm told she doesn't play when it comes to her Minnie Mouse, and that she chose that flower herself to adorn her day. 

One year

That magical hour one year ago today when these two pledged to have and to hold, to love and to laugh, to be besties forever, amen. My heart is so full today, loving their love, loving them, my daughter and the bonus son she gave us, may light surround them always, as they grow and become and find the silver lining in every circumstance and experience the joys of every version of who they are meant to be, together. I love you my darlings. Always.

That's what I wrote on Instagram and Facebook today, copied for the record here, because I have no time to blog thoughtfully as I am trying to finish a first draft of the book. I was supposed to be done by the end of July, but the finish line keeps getting further away as I approach it, as I keep seeing places where I need to go deeper, more people I need to interview, connections I need to make, layers I need to explore. I'm at 97K words now, blew past my contracted 75K words a while back, and I'm still going. I will pass 100K words for sure, but hopefully not by much, and then I will finally get to go back to the beginning and start to read the completed manuscript and see how it hangs together, where I can streamline it for flow and momentum, punch things up, tame things down—the part of the process I most enjoy. I hope it's reads okay.

My daughter and her love went to a rustic spa upstate for the weekend. They stopped at a wildflower farm on the way and picked blooms and made arrangements as anniversary gifts for each other. My girl sent me that photo of their vases and challenged me to pick who made which one. I got it wrong. How wise to escape to nature together for their first anniversary. I'd have loved to have done something celebratory for them, but I lack the gene for staging grand events to mark special dates. I'm always at a loss as to what to do. My best idea is to just hang out and do nothing much with the ones I love best. See? I have no idea about any of it. Why on earth did the souls of my adventurous children pick boring me as their mother?

I do know how to open my front door and welcome people in, though. I have been hosting houseguests all week, my cousin, his wife, and their son from Jamaica. The son attends school in Austin, Texas and is a soccer talent, and a number of colleges are actively recruiting him, so he is here this week with his parents to meet with coaches for different schools and show his skills on the field. The tryouts are at Columbia University's football field, just up the road from me. Turns out I was wrong when I said my family would not visit us in New York this summer given what is happening in the country. Jamaicans are resourceful and defiant. They go where they choose, for their own reasons, and figure out the necessary workarounds. I should have remembered this about my family. 

My cousin’s wife, the mom, is consciously curating her social media in case their youngest gets in to a good school here, and because their second youngest, a daughter, is already in college in D.C. Their oldest, a son, graduated a few years ago and works remotely in tech or finance or something, I'm not quite sure. He shows up in our social media feeds everywhere, from Turkey to Greece to South Africa to Portugal, and we all shake our heads in awe as we watch this handsome young man live his best and most intrepid life. Their second oldest, a daughter, is just finishing her pediatric residency as a doctor in Jamaica. Her dream is to join doctors without borders. My cousin's wife has told her younger two that if things don't work out in America, there are options. I love her pragmatism and fierce mother fire. The family is a joy to host. They make their own breakfast, clean up after themselves, find their own way around the city once I give them directions and a house key, and they are wonderful conversationalists as well. I just need to provide dinner most days, which generally entails ordering in from whatever food venue the group has decided dinner should come from that night. Everyone is easy to please. They arrived a week ago today and leave on Monday. 

Then it will be back to my routine, writing in my corner, trying to keep my heart from crumbling out of my chest as a besieged people starve in plain view of us all. One day, the saying goes, we will have all been against this. We are against it now.

Some thoughts after the family cookout

We gathered upstate on Friday for a cookout to celebrate our son in law's birthday. His family does it up every year at the home of one of his aunts, as both he and another of his cousins are born on July fourth. This year, my son and his wife joined the party, and my Brooklyn niece also came, her third year being there, she declared herself a regular now. My daughter still finds it a bit like worlds colliding that her brother is now pals with all her husband's upstate cousins. 

My son is law is from a big family, his mother is one of eleven, and he arrived on this earth with a large group of male cousins born within a few years of him. Most of them went on his bachelor trip to Tulum last year. My son, my niece's husband in Dallas, and the groom-to-be's friends from high school, college, and grad school were also on the trip. In all there were twelve men from very different backgrounds and life experiences, with very different social presentations, and yet they all got on famously, and are all now great pals. It was fascinating to see how warmly they greeted each other at the wedding, and then again last Friday. My daughter's husband is a connector. So is my son. In fact, they had a few natural connectors in that group, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised they all bonded. 

Come to think of it, the thing all those young men have in common is a strong sense of family. Maybe learning to navigate all the different and quirky personalities within large, close, extended families is good preparation for navigating the different and quirky personalities one encounters in life? I do know that growing up within my particular family definitely gave me an appreciation for people's quirks. In fact, I find I'm more drawn to people who let their freak flags fly. Here are a couple more cookout pics of my own beautifully idiosyncratic family.

How do you keep a wave up off the sand*

I did this puzzle in a single day, in between bursts of writing. I thought it would be a hard one, but it turned out that every piece announced exactly where it belonged. I thoroughly enjoyed the symphony of colors, shapes, and flow, and while I was putting it together, my mind emptied. Puzzling is as close to meditation as this noisy brain of mine can get. 

On the subject of noisy brains, I went to college with a kid who in our senior year was committed to the psych ward and diagnosed with schizophrenia because he was convinced the government was watching him through his TV. Yesterday I read an article in a reputable journal about the government activating an online program that can tap into the wifi in our home without our knowledge, tracking everything we do there though our TVs. Of course, there was already Alexa and Siri and our iPhones suddenly throwing up ads for whatever product we just talked about in the privacy of our living rooms, so I suppose this isn't all that earth shaking.

People say, don't overshare; watch what you post online; avoid certain words that will attract the crawlers. But also, anything you delete from your devices from all the years when it was considered safe to freely express your heart, mind, and quippy soul can be restored within minutes just by hooking your machine up to their machine. So.

Those of you who visited yesterday may have seen that post I wrote in a moment when the vision of what's coming was pressing in on me. Today I am working on becoming numb again, because I don't see what I can do to turn back a wave that is inexorably crashing ashore, but if you have an idea, do share. Until then, I will burrowing my head into the sand, figuratively speaking, and making my world as microcosmic as I can. I won't even wave to the bots watching through my TV. 

____________

*Lyric adapted from "Maria," a song from The Sound of Music. 

My dad used to think the lines of this song described me, for example: 

How do you make her stay
And listen to all you say?
How do you keep a wave upon the sand?
How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

After we saw the film when I was a child, one of his enduring nicknames for me was Maria. He used it fondly, if long-sufferingly, and I remember I rather liked being fondly regarded as a problem.

Feeling anything but zen

This week I am spinning out. I am reading the portents, and they don't look good for certain folk, we all know who. The map of history is taking us to a very particular destination, we are already very far along that road, and there is really no way to protect ourselves from the inevitabilities. At this point it's a matter of where their axes will fall, which road to the ultimate goal they will set us on, and of course, the timing, which seems to be imminent now, as judicial chaos sets in, as firewalls crumble, as wilderness camps are readied. Someone said the disappearing of migrants was only the rehearsal, the testing of the machinery. Soon, they will unveil what the real game has always been. It begins with dismantling the fourteenth. And now the order signed to prioritize the stripping away of naturalised citizenship, based on categories of assessment, some of them broadly subjective, to determine whether the citizens in question pose any sort of threat. They're threatening to come for the bright young man who just won the mayoral primary in my city by twelve points. Can they really do that—subvert the will of the people by detaining, deporting, disappearing—pick your D-gerund—the duly elected nominee? I can’t help but feel that would be yet another order of magnitude. The psychological warfare intensifies, the rollback of centuries comes into view.