And even more Beltane

Our Beltane baby has arrived.  Beltane night we danced around the fire pit at the Emeryville Marina, in hopes that Sarah's still-in-utero daughter might be inspired to show up and join the fun. She waited until very late the next day. But finally she's here: the first baby born to anyone since the coven was formed.

We'd been calling the baby ``Ziggy''--short for zygote-- ever since we knew Sarah was pregnant. Sarah and Todd were closemouthed about what her real name would be. So we didn't find out until after she arrived that she is Aradia Zorah.  Which is certainly an appropriately witchy name for coven's first daughter. But I find myself wondering if she'll ever really shake off Ziggy, as we've all called her that for so long.

She's an 8 pound 12 ounce baby who was 21 inches long when she was born. That's nearly as big as my largest baby, and my kids all grew up to be over six feet tall. So it will be interesting to see what she grows up to be.

With Ziggy safely arrived, I felt no compunction about heading off to Bodega Bay yesterday for yet another Beltane event, the maypole dance hosted annually by my friend Anne Hill.  My dancing days are over because of my cruddy crone knee and its myriad problems, but I went anyway, glad for another chance to celebrate Beltane, see friends, and enjoy the long green drive through western Sonoma and Marin counties.

Bodega Bay is where Hitchcock shot The Birds, that very scary 1950s film about the birds that take over the universe.  I did see a lot of birds on the way, including turkey vultures and red-tailed hawks riding the winds, and red-winged blackbirds perched in the skeletons of last year's wild fennel plants.

This particular maypole is about 25 feet tall, a sapling of some kind that was cut several years ago. It's topped with a bouquet of flowers. The dancers all hold ribbons attached to the top of the pole and dance and dance until the pole is tightly wrapped in a multicolored weave of ribbons. This takes a bit of time as people weave in and out and round and round.

Afterward, the pole seems to hum with the energy and intentions of everyone who danced around it.  It's like a conduit between the energies of earth and sky. Which makes sense as the may pole is intended to evoke the Yggdrasil, the world tree.

We haven't had much late rain this season, so already the fields and hillsides out in the west counties are turning golden. The wild radishes, California poppies, vetch and wild lupine are all abloom everywhere.  Hilllsides were dotted with black and white Holsteins or flocks of sheep, complete with gambolling baby lambs. Farm stands were selling organic strawberries, and the roads were filled with bicyclists enjoying a mild spring day. It was a good day to spend far away from both the computer screen and the very big media company.


Yet another merry May!

There's nothing quite like the way we celebrate Beltane here in the East Bay. We get up at 4 a.m. and head up to Inspiration Point in Tilden Regional Park. This part straddles the Berkeley Hills, and Inspiration Point has a clear vista to the east, the better to see the dawn.

I'm sure they didn't have the Pagan community in mind when they laid out the park 72 years ago, but Inspiration Point could not be a better site for our May day rituals. People gather in the pre-dawn darkness, some wrapped in blankets, parkas, or heavy sweaters. I wore my heavy black witch cape that I always wear on Samhain, which will come again in half a year.

Some of us crone types bring along our own lawn chairs, which we drag to the perimeter of the parking lot. When civil twilight starts to change to ordinarily twilight, we hear a minor-key fiddle tune off in the distance. Then two-by-two dancers from the Berkeley Morris process slowly into the  open area, each one carrying a set of deer antlers. They perform the slow and stately -- and very ancient -- Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, slowly advancing and retreating, clicking sets of horns together when they meet face to face.

Here's a video of a group--not the Berkeley Morris--performing the dance at a festival in the UK. This is exactly how the music sounds, but the version we see on Beltane is  danced more slowly and reverently.  And here's the tune being played on a concertina.

Often the dancers appear in a swirl of mist, but today it was clear and not nearly as cold as it's sometimes been in the past.  After this dance is completed, the Morris dances all the lively traditional May dances. They wear white trousers, and long-sleeved white shirts, dark red vests, leggins covered with bells, and black hats adorned--each to his or her own fancy--with ribbons, flowers and feathers.

In addition to the fiddle there are several concertinas or diatonic accordions, a mandolin, a muffled drum and an instrument that looks like an oboe but has a deeper sound. 

Sometimes the dancers wave white handkerchiefs or knock sticks together, Sometimes they form elaborate patterns like a windmill.

Lucy the Bear, who is coaxed forth from her den by the inner fires of Beltane makes an appearance, as does the fool, who wears a top hat, and smacks people on the head with the modern day equivalent of the jester's bladder: an inflated rubber glove painted to look like a chicken.  And they bring around trays of May cake, a lovely poppyseed cake, for everyone. Here's a link to a whole page of short amateur videos of the Berkeley Morris at Inspiration Point last Beltane.

When the sun actually peeps up on the horizon, the dancing stops and everyone joins in singing May carols. Yes, there really is such a thing as a May carol. My favorite is Jack o' the Green.

Then we have more dancing, finishing with a huge circle dance in which everyone participates.  And then we leave the park and head over to a friend's house for a fancy breakfast: crepes, strawberries, lemon sauce, almonds, muffins, fruit compote, sausage, bacon and probably a few other things I've forgotten.

Today after I left the breakfast, it was too lovely to go back home. I ran a few errands, then found a park on the Oakland harbor and sat there for a couple of hours, watching the sea birds and celebrating this wonderful holiday by being happy at being alone with myself. (Beltane is generally associated with couples and coupling and all sorts of goings on in the forest, to celebrate the beginning of the lusty month of May, so it's a real achievement to feel quite wonderful about celebrating part of the day in solitude).

Tonight I'm off to a bonfire/picnic with my coven sisters and a band with a seasonally appropriate name, Beltane Fire.  We're still waiting for Ms.  Ziggy to appear, and are hoping that the festivities tonight might convince her that life is a lot more interesting out here in the daylight rather than in utero.

I just realized I haven't yet hung the Green Man I made in pottery class out in the garden. Today would certainly be the day to bring his magic into the garden. I was waiting for the companion piece-- a head I made of the Roman Goddess Flora--to be finished, but she still has one more firing to go.  Definitely the two of the belong in the garden, today more than any other day.

It's been a lovely day, and it's the very first day off I've taken since I started working at the very big media company last September. All the sweeter for its rarity, I guess.

Everything is beautiful at the ballet

It's been an intense two weeks since my father died, and I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about him. Today I decided I needed a break so I'm writing about something dear to my heart: ballet.

The phrase above--taken from  Chorus Line, of course-- is written at the top of my email file at work. I chose the phrase for a couple of reasons. It's such an antidote to the law-and-business world where I spent my days. And it reflects my great and lifelong love of ballet.

My grandmother kindled my passion when she took me to see a performance of Ballets Russe de whatever incarnation at the old Seattle Civic Auditorium when I was in early elementary school in the early 1950s.  We saw Alexandra Danilova dance the Dying Swan, and I was transfixed. I  couldn't have imagined  anything could be so beautiful.  I remember my grandmother smiled and said, yes she was very good, but ``I have seen Pavlova.'' (She referred, of course, to the great Anna Pavlova, one of the stars of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg before the Russian revolution.  Pavlova, more than anyone else, brought ballet to the western hemisphere, playing in hundreds of small venues throughout North and South America).

I took ballet as a child, but my teacher was worse than mediocre  and the classes were split, half ballet and half tap dancing. I hated the tap dancing, and the silly costumes we had to wear for recitals, but I was in heaven the minute we got to the ballet portion of the class. Alas, I am over 6'5" en pointe, which made the notion of getting really serious about ballet ludicrous back then. (Today there are some excellent tall ballet dancers, notably Muriel Maffre, who danced with SF Ballet for 17  years).

When I was got married in 1965, I insisted we race home from our honeymoon so I could see the legendary Fonteyn/Nureyev partnership in a performance of Romeo and Juliet.

For part of my career as a journalist, I was a ballet critic, and  I loved having those two seats on the aisle in the 10th row aht are a critic's privilege.  In that era I saw the Joffrey Ballet in its great flowering while Bob Joffrey was still alive, and just about every dance company that made it to Seattle.  And I read about every other company and dancer, longing to see them in their glory.

A few months ago I made a discovery: huge amounts of ballet are available on the Internet. All you have to do is a Google video search, and the most any performances I've ever wanted to see showed up.

Who could have imagined that I'd be able to find actual footage of Pavlova dancing the Dying Swan? The film was shot in 1911, with all the limitations of the era, but still, it's Pavlova herself. (One thing amuses me. Apparently some younger ballet students have seen the video, are unaware of who Pavlova was, and these silly little twits are  presumptuous enough to offer her some pointers on technique).

Fonteyn and Nureyev, who are now both dancing in what we Pagans call The Summerland, can be seen in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.  How amazing that Fonteyn at age 40 was an utterly believable 14-year-old Juliet in the first flush of young love.

Maya Plisetskaya,  the Bolshoi's  prima ballerina assoluta, did not have many opportunities to perform in the west when she was at her peak. Her father was killed during the Stalinist purges, and the fact that she was Jewish in an era of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism  in the Soviet Union meant she stayed home when the Bolshoi began to perform in Europe and, later, in the U.S.   She married Rodion Shchedron, a well-known Russian composer who created the score for the Anna Karenina (based on Tolstoy''s novel, of course) ballet . Plisetskaya choreographed this ballet and danced with  the Bolshoi.  Just fragments are available on the Internet,  but the finale, with the approach of the train is terrifying and  heart-breaking.

Ravel's ``Bolero'' is far from my favorite piece of music, but I simply could not stop watching Plisetskaya dancing the version set on her by Maurice Bejart.  The ballet is for 40 men and Plisetskaya, and  her energy never flags through the entire piece.

Mark Morris is a dancer/choreographer I've watched for years, beginning when he was just a kid, dancing with the Koleda Folk Ensemble in Seattle. Several years ago I saw him dance Queen Dido in his  balletic version of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. This section, in which he is dancing Dido's lament, always brings me to tears.

In my wanderings, I've found several new-to-me dancers whose work I love. First is Alina Cojocaru, a tiny Romania-born dancer who is now taking principal roles at the Royal Ballet. Cojocaru is absolutely ravishing  in Sleeping Beauty's Rose Adagio, and she knocks off those impossible balances  with a radiant smile.  And her entry into the ballroom in Cinderella Act II is simply magical. She enters, so dazzled by the otherworldliness and transformation the fairy godmother has wrought that she floats down the stairs en pointe,  not even noticing the prince as he takes her hand.

Marcia Haydee, who danced with the Stuttgart Ballet, was the late choreographer John Cranko's muse. He set the Eugene Onegin ballet on her, and I was  pleased to find the ballet's final scene--where she relinquishes Onegin forever--available on the Web. Haydee won fame as a dramatic ballerina, with acting skills on a par with her technical excellence.

Natalia Osipova is one of the up-and-coming ballerinas at the Bolshoi. I don't like her in everything, but she dazzles as Kitri in Don Q. Check out the huge grands jetes in this tiny segment of the grand pas de deux variation from Don Quixote.  She's so athletic, with huge jumps. I do not like her Giselle at all. In my opinion, she's way too earthy to be a believable Wili. Here's her Giselle debut, where Myrtha, the queen of the Wilis, calls her forth from her grave.

Speaking of athleticism, how could I ever have missed Tetsuaya Kumakawa, who danced with the Royal Ballet before he went home to Japan to found his own company. When I first saw this variation from Don Q, I really couldn't believe what I was watching, and had to go back and run it several times.

The performance that's moved me the most was Darcey Bussell's farewell performance with the Royal Ballet last June. She danced the lead role in Kenneth McMillan's ``Song of the Earth,'' which was set to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde for two vocalists and orchestra. Bussell retired at the peak of her powers, and never has she danced more powerfully and passionately than she did that night. Here you can see the final, ``Farewell'' section of the ballet. And here's the ovation she receives afterward.  Incidentally, you can see the entire ballet on the Internet. Here's part 1, part 2, and part 3.   Bussell chose this ballet for her farewell performance, and it's impossible to imagine any other work that would have suited her better.

One other ballet favorite I've seen on the Internet is not really a dance at all. It's the``grand défilé'' of all the students  and the company of the Paris Opera Ballet. This great parade is a tradition at the beginning of the season.  All the curtains are opened, and the dancers  come forth one by one, to the march from Berlioz' Troyens opera,  beginning with the youngest and finishing with the etoiles.

The Paris Opera Ballet, founded in 1661 by Louis LXIV is the oldest ballet company in the world. I've watched this a number of times, and it always reminds me of the fact that ballet is an art form transmitted from person to person over the ages. It always requires this human connection--even in the era of videotape--in order for its spirit to survive.

Every night when I come home from work and wait for my last editor to sign off on my work for the day, I fire up my laptop and watch ballet.  Frankly, I can't think of a better way to spend that necessary waiting time.

Pravda--different kinds of truth

Last night I finished reading Pravda, a novel by David Docx. It's a novel about a multi-generation British-Russian family and is set in Manhattan, London and St. Petersburg in the post-Soviet era.  In this book, St. Petersburg is not the sparkling city of ``white nights,''  the State Hermitage Museum or the glories of the Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky Theater.

Everything has gone off, is old, decaying, cynical, callous and, ultimately, despairing. No family relationship is as it seems and long-held family secrets eat corrosively at possibilities of connection and affection.  Still, all said, it was an extraordinary book, one of the best novels I've read in quite some time. I think I'll be on the lookout for The Calligrapher, which is the other novel Docx has written.

One of the characters is an editor at a London publishing house that specializes in trade publications and self-help magazines.  Surely none of us -- even in the most decadent days at the late and lamented West Bank Guide in Gretna, Louisiana -- ever worked at a publication this disfunctional. I was reading it on the Alameda ferry and  laughed and laughed so much when I got to that section that I am sure the other passengers were convinced I was demented.

But then I got to a section that left me absolutely speechless.  The book describes the response of one of the characters to the  recent death of a parent.  It so closely paralleled what I have experienced that it was downright eerie.

The author wrote of his character Isabel ``she recognized her error, that the precise opposite of that which she had imagined was in fact true: when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat but rise from their sarcophagi and move out across the borders of the mind, swearing in their puppet regimes as they pass. And from here on in, it would be frontline, hand-to-hand: her against them. You think that your journey from birth to death is a journey away from the clutches of your parents but in fact it's the reverse.''

All I can say is that's exactly how the past two weeks since Dad's death have felt. Instead of feeling free of his heavy hand, I now am bumping up against all the old antagonisms and resentments he harbored and encouraged. And finding that someone else has identified this situation and written about it, albeit in a work of fiction, was a staggering experience.

I 've been thinking of my memories of my father. They are so overlaid with a mythology he created and that my mom supported that it's hard to peel back the layers to find the reality and the person who lived within. Out of the corners of my memory, I can see him in his red felt hunting hat and plaid mackinaw, building our first house with his own hands, never stopping, never knowing the meaning of recreation or relaxation.

He had strange rigidities that came, I think, from a perpetual sense of outsiderness that probably was the result of being a motherless immigrant. His mom died of the same von Willebrand's Disease that contributed so much to Dad's health problems, and left him the youngest of six children on a wheat farm in Washington State's Whitman County Palouse country. His name -- Bjarne Slind -- was difficult for non-Norwegians to pronounce, and Dad was easily embarrassed when he had to explain himself to others in any way. He was acutely aware of what he thought others were thinking of him, and often we, his children, caused him much pain because of the supposed damage we did to people's opinion of him.

Dad was always a very driven man. Whatever he did, it occupied 200 percent of his energy. When we were kids,  the Boeing Company took all his attention, focus, and energy. We never took a family vacation, he never took a day off--that we knew about--and always we were told to be proud of our dad because he worked so much harder than anyone else.

He was generally gone by the time we got up in the morning for school, and most nights he didn't come home for dinner. He brought home metal models of the planes and other projects on which he worked, generally attached with a swooping curve of metal to metal ashtrays. I remember the B-47 and the B-52 bombers, then the Minuteman missile, the Lunar Orbiter, and, his final project, the AWCS airborne warning and control system you may have seen in the form of a huge mushroom-shaped radar dome that rises up out of the back of a large military jet.

He was always on the go. He had the kind of soft-sided suitcase called a ``B-4 bag'' and it seemed as if every week my mom was pressing his pants and packing his B-4 bag  for another trip. At first he often went to Dayton, Ohio -- presumably to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base --and to Boeing's plant in Wichita, Kansas.  ( I remember mistakenly writing Dayton down as a state in a grade-school test. Dad went there so often, I was sure it was a state. And I was always scared as a little kid when he went to Wichita because I just knew that was where all the witches lived.  Now that I hang out with the witches, I think that's pretty funny).

Later on he got to more exotic destination, like Paris for the annual air show; and to Madrid, Spain and Woomera, Australia, to the deep-space tracking stations set up there. He went to Calcutta and hated it, and visited Germany many times, which he loved, because ``it is so clean there.''

He moved the whole family to Florida when he was working on the Minuteman missile.  All of us had immense cultural shock from which, I think in some ways, our family never quite recovered. I went from a very genteel all-girls private school I had attended from first grade onward to spend my senior year in a huge coeducational public high school that was racially segregated, and had mandatory classroom prayers and Bible reading. 

The town of Cocoa Beach where we lived had been retooled for the interests of the various male military, scientists and engineers who most often came to the Cape on short-term stays without their families. So the town was comprised of little but motels and bars, most of which had a space theme. And many of the men who worked at the Cape stopped off at the bars before they went home at night. Alcohol  consumption was an accepted part of late 1950s--early 1960s military-industrial complex male-bonding culture.  I suppose the strip along Highway A1A was a bit like early versions of the Vegas strip in the ``rat pack'' days, minus the gambling, but with all the other distractions. Here's just a little bit of what the dads passed by every night on the strip between the Cape and freshly build tract homes on newly dredged land where everyone lived.

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I can remember being proud whenever a Minuteman missile was successfully tested, and loved the glamor that the first Mercury 7 astronauts brought to the community. But all in all, it was a hard time for the family. Social scientists later wrote about the families who lived there at that time. They called what we experienced the ``Brevard County Syndrome,'' and they didn't see it as a good thing. So many of us had come to Central Florida's Brevard County from somewhere else and we kids--and many of the wives--didn't want to be there. Everything felt alien to us, including the sleepy segregated public schools that suddenly had an exploding enrollment of very bright kids whose dads were the scientists, engineers, and military officers that pushed America's space program forward.

The social scientists said that the dads -- who lived in the high-pressure zero-defects-tolerated atmosphere of  Cape Canaveral -- simply could not tolerate the normal comings and goings of their children. When they came home from work, their families seemed unbelievably sloppy and undisciplined. So the fathers seldom came home when the kids were up, or they had to stop and  anesthetize themselves at those space-themed bars first, or simply became unbearable martinets when they did encounter their children.  I don't even need to go into specifics but I can say that our family was just like the others in the county with a space-program connection, except that our father had the added burden of his sense of outsiderness that dominated everything else. Those were certainly the most difficult years our family has ever experienced.

From those days my memories of my father are of a man with a flat-top haircut  going off to work every day wearing the same starched short-sleeved white shirt that all the other engineers wore. (When I saw ``The Right Stuff,'' I laughed out loud at the Mission Control scenes because everyboy was wearing the same geeky white shirts Dad wore in that era).  We learned a new vocabulary: ``AOK,'' and ``work the problem'' from him.

In later years my memories are of his perpetually working to maintain an already flawlessly maintained house on Mercer Island, in Washington State. I think it was painted every year, and the roof was replaced every two or three years. His garage workroom looked more like an operating suite, with the walls painted white, and every tool in its appointed place. C clamps and screwdrivers and hammers were all hung in size-gradated order.  Nothing was out of place. And inside the house, nothing ever was on any counter top. 

When my kids were little, I'd bring them over to see him, but he couldn't tolerate much contact and quickly retreated to his garage. That was more or less a pattern he repeated with almost everyone for the rest of his life. And in the last decade of his life, I can't think of one single family event--weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays or other celebrations--he attended.

His last couple of years were marked by a serious physical decline, particularly after his second wife died. I don't think I'll ever know to what extent it was osteoporosis and to what extent it was to damage from tossing 80-lb wheat sacks into rail cars, but Dad shrank and shrank physically.  I've been 6 feet tall since I was 13, and at first Dad was my same height. The last few times I saw him, he was so small, and so bent over that I bet he wasn't even 5 feet tall. My brother Eric was perpetually having to buy Dad smaller and smaller-sized clothing, as Dad lost his appetite and barely ate. 

The last two times I saw him, he was very gray everywhere and slouched down in the corner of his wheelchair. He still had what was left of a flat-top haircut that gave him a little wisp of hair in the front. He could not hear very well, and sometimes was not well-oriented in time or space. He spread the newspaper out on his bed in the nursing home and sat curled over in his wheelchair, reading it carefully from cover to cover every day.  He was terribly lonely, even though he probably received more visitors than all the other residents put together. 

I felt so sad to see him that way. Yet I knew there was nothing I could say or do that would change his physical decline or  alter his feelings of loneliness. He was forever convinced his physical problems were only temporary and perpetually badgered my brother to get him back his possessions and his car so he could resume his normal life.

I did what I could for him from California's Bay Area where I now live.  I wrote him long letters and illustrated them with photos in efforts to remind him there was a world -- and a family -- outside the nursing home.  The last time I visited him, I stopped at Boehm's in Issaquah and bought him some chocolate for his lifelong sweet tooth that I unfortunately inherited.  He always had princess-delicate skin, so I had some special mild soap sent him  that was made by the Cistercian nuns in the newly revived Tautra Mariakloster in Trondheimfjord, not that far from where he was born.

And now he's gone. I remember someone saying that every time an elder in the family dies, it's  as if someone has burned another volume in the library of world history. There's still so much I'll never know about Dad, his sense of the world, and the history of his family that came to America in 1922. 

This photo below was taken in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in late 1944 or early 1945. I'm the year-old toddler, and Dad is in his dress blues. He was in the U.S. Navy and stationed at Treasure Island, which is why I'm a native San Franciscan.  I wish all the days we spent together were as happy as this day.

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We still have no memorial planned. The planning has become a bit of a testy process. But, one would hope, things will simmer down and we will be able to gather together and remember this complicated man in the best way we can.

 

Waiting waiting waiting

One of my coven sisters is due to have her first baby any time now. Two weeks ago we had a mother blessing and baby shower for her here at the loft, and last week her parents arrived from what we, on this side of the country, call ``back east.''

She's planning to deliver at home with a midwife and a doula, and has been working hard to get her body and spirit ready for this big adventure. She went home from the shower heavily laden with all sorts of baby things, many with flowers or in pink, since the baby--presently known as Ms. Ziggy (a nickname she's had ever since  we knew we had a zygote among us)--is a girl.  Here the mom-to-be  is in her waiting waiting waiting configuration.
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I  have to confess to grievous impracticality that no doubt betrayed some of my feminist principles, since the baby gift I gave her was the tiniest possible pair of pink kid Capezio Teknik ballet shoes, a pink leotard and tights, and a tiny tutu skirt.  The mom is a dancer, so it's not totally out of line. But to compensate, I also bought a pair of Oshkosh overalls and a t-shirt with a woman-power symbol.  Can you tell how badly I want a granddaughter? I do have a quite extraordinary grandson--pictured below at bat--but I also long so much for a granddaughter.

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Over the last week, I've watched a number of home childbirth videos posted on  the Internet. My babies were all C-sections, so I'd never really had the experience of seeing ``normal'' birth. Oh my goodness, it's a wonder that any babies make it into the world alive! And that moms survive the process. This moving a baby from inside the mother's body to the outside world is certainly normal, natural, and, after all, women have been doing this forever. Still, it's a very complex process, certainly very hard work for the mom.

So I've been thinking about my eldest daughter who turned 40 yesterday. Yes, I really do have a 40-year-old daughter. She's in the height of her beauty, physical strength and professional competence, so I know she won't fear her 40th birthday the way women of my generation sometimes did, and the way my mother's generation certainly did.

I remember so well the day she was born. Like my coven sister, I was waiting waiting waiting. And I had a lengthy trial of labor with her before we went ahead with the C-section. I remember that unlike my other babies, she was born with dark hair that curled, even when she first appeared. Her cheeks were so chubby and pink, and of all the children, she had the strongest cry.

She was born on a day when the pink flowering cherry trees in the University of Washington Arboretum were in full bloom, and the tulips in my garden were knee high. I remember giving her 18-month-old big brother a little ride on the back of  my bike that morning, and also taking a leap across the flower bed, just because I was so excited that this was the day a baby was coming. We took the long way in to the hospital so I could see all the pink trees in bloom in the arboretum, and to this day, whenever I see a flowering tree in the springtime, I always think of my daughter. Here I am on my bike that morning. My blond little David Bjarne Flor is sitting on the bike behind me.

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Kristin is now my eldest surviving child.  (David was killed in a mountaineering accident when he was 23). Our relationship is often difficult and strained, and I don't have the chance to see her very often. But even so, I know we have a deep  and abiding connection  that nothing will ever really sunder.   Of all of my kids, I think she's the one who most strongly inherited the intensity and energy I bring to work and everyday life. Here's a photo of her holding the grandson when he was a baby. I'm the grandma in the Norwegian sweather, and the other two folks are also my kids, my 38-year old son, and my 37-year-old daughter. Given that I'm six feet tall, you can see I've spawned a race of giants.

Allkids
So I'm still waiting for an email or a phone call that Ms. Ziggy has arrived. Like everyone else in the coven, I'm trying hard not to bug the mom-to-be. I know there's nothing more annoying than being hugely pregnant and facing constant inquiries about just when that baby is going to get here.

Bjarne Slind 4/17/19--4/12/08

It's been a long time since I've made a blog posting. The new job with the very big media company  eats essentially all my time and leaves my hands capable of making very few extra keystrokes.

But today I need to think about what it means that my father Bjarne Slind died last Saturday.  I always think best by placing the tips of my fingers on a computer keyboard and watching to see what I write.

Dad died last Saturday morning, five days short of his 89th birthday. By all accounts he died quickly, and probably never knew what happened to him. He'd had a long slow physical decline, and his many health issues were like  competing train wrecks. He had a great deal of physical discomfort in his last years, and many limitations of his mobility and freedom to be independent.

My brother Eric has been his primary--and incredibly devoted and compassionate-- caregiver through the past five or six years. Dad moved to assisted living after his wife died four years ago, and then, last year, after he broke his hip and had hip-replacement surgery, he required a higher level of care. So he had to be moved to a nursing home.

Eric found Dad a wonderful place to stay, a real house, with only four other elderly residents, and a whole family living there. He had a beautiful garden in which he could sit, and there was always something happening at the house in terms of kids, pets, and blooming plants for him to see. Dad wasn't terribly happy there, but then, considering his physical decline and the limitations on his freedom, I doubt he would have been very happy anywhere. Still, it was the very very best you could imagine for someone with his physical limitations.

Dad was an immigrant who came over to Washington State's Palouse country with his parents and five older siblings from Selbu, Norway in 1922. He was only three at the time, but was my grandmother's last baby, so was at home with her, and speaking only Norwegian far longer than his older siblings. His mother died of the complications of von Wildebrand's disease when he was 10, and I think the early loss of his mother was one of the primary filters through which he viewed the world for the rest of his life.

Like many other immigrants, the choices he made in terms of education and profession were pragmatic. He was good at math and science, so chose to study electrical engineering in college. Along with many others of the ``greatest generation,'' he served in the U.S. military during World War II. And like many men with engineering degrees in the Pacific Northwest, he went to work for Boeing right out of school, and stayed there his entire career. 

I think Boeing opened many doors for him that he could not have otherwise known existed. Boeing gave him an outlet for his perfectionism and desire for accomplishment.  Because of his work at Boeing, he was able to travel the world--I think he actually flew more than 1 million miles on United Airlines over the years--and saw and worked in places like Cape Canaveral, Florida,  Madrid, Spain and Woomera, Australia. And he had the opportunity to be an aviation pioneer and move, with Boeing, into the space age.

He married at a relatively young age, at the age of 23, just four months to the day after Pearl Harbor. And he had four kids within nine years. Mom died after 31 years of marriage, and he remarried someone who also lived to have a 31-year marriage with him. When his second wife died, all the light went out of his life, and I think he merely endured the passing of every day after her death.

I suppose all of us--his children--are like him in some ways we consciously chose and in others that just came along for the ride. All of us are very hard-working like Dad was, and each of us takes a great deal of pride in and care for the work we do, certainly a lesson we learned from him. Dad had a great love of the Western U.S., and it's no accident that all of his children and grandchildren live on this side of the country. 

Some of us inherited Dad's love of travel. I know that even in today's miserable airline conditions, I am happy to get onto an airplane and always sit by the window so I can look out and see where I've been and how the plane is operating.

We're all storytellers, every single one of us. I joke that this is part of our Viking heritage because in ancient times, the storytellers always got fed and had a chance to sit by the fire. But I also think that it comes from hearing so many of Dad's stories. Like anyone else who ever worked in the aviation industry, Dad  could never talk about a flight without getting his hands out to describe his flight path.

Amazingly, Dad knew just as many stories about our mom's side of the family as he did about his own. In the last few years of his life, whenever I'd go visit him, I'd take along a reporter's notebook, and interview him about long-ago days:  about hitching up mules to pull the combine and sewing shut wheat  sacks during harvest; about where he was when he heard about Pearl Harbor; about what his mother thought during her first years as an immigrant.

We had a difficult relationship from day one. I think Dad wanted everything to be nice and acceptable and  to conform to what he though were appropriate social mores, some of which were more suited to 19th century rural Norway. And I never have found such behavior easy.

Yet I remain proud of many of Dad's accomplishments. He was, on so many levels, a self-made man. He liked to solve problems, and even now, I find that thinking a project through is often my favorite part of writing or making art or arranging my garden. I think that problem-solving systems approach he had is a good thing, although he sometimes did quirky things, like laying out his garden with an irrigation system grid of white plastic pipe. Yes, it did the job, but it was somewhat less than an utter aesthetic delight.

I'm so sorry my children--and indeed, all his grandchildren and great-grands--had such a limited experience of Dad, particularly when he was younger and healthier. Later in life, particularly when his health began to decline, he found it very difficult to be around people other than his wife, particularly in situations in which he could not be in control.  Life with young people is not something that can be tightly controlled with tidy boundaries.  So, for the most part, the kids did not see him all that often,  and rarely saw him at his best.

We will be having some sort of memorial/family picnic in June, I think. Right now it's too hard to get the family together, and too expensive, particularly for the younger people in the family, to buy plane tickets on such short notice. Dad is being cremated and his ashes are going in a niche in a Seattle cemetery next to his second wife.

I  added a few photos of Dad at the bottom. of this posting: The first is of Dad probably around the time he started first grade. He's in his bib overalls with one of the farm dogs. The second photo is of Dad with his parents and siblings. Throughout his life, whenever he said the phrase ''my family,'' these are the people he meant. He's the youngest, so he's right in front. The third photo is from the World War II era, and Dad, in his  Navy uniform is at a San Francisco nightclub with our very blond and glamorous mother. Next is a photo of me riding a horse with Dad at my maternal grandparents' ranch in Ellensburg, Washington.  The fifth photo was taken at what was one of our very few family picnics. It think this was around 1992 or so. Dad is with my brother Eric, and yes indeed the family resemblance is very strong.

Dad_with_dog138  Old_slind_photo230 Nightclub229_2 Me_riding_horse_with_dad198 Eric_and_dad177_2

Well, as I so often say, what is remembered lives. And yes, Dad's is one of the names I'll read when we do the spiral dance next Samhain.

I'm now the elder of the family, and I will do the best I can to share photos, and stories from Dad's life with the rest of the family. If we don't remember who we are and who came before us, we will be heading off into the future with no roots. And that doesn't feel like a good way to try to go foward.

 

The real thing

Over the years I've constructed several different home-made musical instruments. I made my grandson a rain stick from a Pringles can. Many of my friends have received ceramic rattles from me that I made in pottery class. One year for a Yule ritual, I strung jingle bells on metal bangles so everyone would have bells to ring. And someday I'd dearly love to make some instruments from PVC pipe like the instruments used by Blue Man Group.

Along the way I've constructed a few very primitive sistrums using y-shaped pieces of wood from my alder tree, floral wire, and flattened bottle caps. I've always thought sistrums were cool instruments. I can remember that they were mentioned in the Bible, and, before that, were associated with Isis or with Hathor.  The British museum has this lovely sistrum bearing an image of Hathor  This  instrument is supposed to sound like the wind blowing through the reeds along the banks of the River Nile. (Ancient Egyptians always connected Isis with the annual inundation of the Nile.  Here's a typical--and ancient-- sistrum with rods that create a sound by sliding back and forth.

Sistrum
Earlier this month, when I was at the Brooklyn Museum, I happened to see this sistrum in a case with other Egyptian antiquities. It is also decorated with an image of Hathor-as-cow-goddess. I wish now that I could remember what the museum's label said about the metal used. It looks too substantial to be copper, and the museum says it's bronze. I love Hathor's cow ears sticking out past her heavy Egyptian wig.

Hathor_face_sistrum_from_brooklyn_m

A strange flowering

Last February I bought a small young vine from my favorite nursery, Annie's Annuals in Richmond, California. About 15 minutes after I planted it, the snails ate it down to ground level. I put out snail bait, they left it alone. The vine pushed its way up through the ground again. The rains came and diluted the snail bait. The snails came and ate the vine down to ground level again. This cycle went on three or four times.

When the rains stopped in mid-April, the snails apparently had better things to do and left the vine alone. So it began to grow again. Every day I'd go out into the garden, breathe on its baby leaves--in hopes the carbon dioxide I was exhaling would stimulate its growth--and would urge it onward and upward. And from time to time, I scratched more compost into the soil around the vine.

It crept upward slowly, twining around a couple of bamboo poles. Finally this week it started blooming and I have to say this vine has one of the strangest-looking flowers I've ever had in my garden. The vine in question is a member of the Aristolochia family, specifically Aristolochia elegans.

This flower is said to be shaped like a Dutchman's pipe. The face of the flower is red and white speckled, which is why, perhaps, the informal name of this plant is "Calico Flower." According to information on Annie's Annuals website,  the color is supposed to resemble rotting meat, and therefore attract carrion-eating insects. (Fortunately, it does not smell like rotting meat, however). This  plant depends on carrion-feeding insects for its pollination.

Incidentally, Aristolochia is indigenous to the state of Florida, where it's considered a noxious invasive pest. Given climate differences between Florida and northern California and the fact that I'm growing this vine in a container, I don't think it will cause any problems here. Here's my first shot of one of my Aristolichia's flowers. I'm glad the snails finally left me enough vine to grow this amazing flower.
Aristolochia_elegans

Losing one of our own

Members of my family have served with honor in the U.S. military as far back as I can remember. At the same time, members of my family have also stood in opposition to the horrors of war. I think, like many American familes, we've understood that one can both be committed to serve, and at the same time, repulsed that there is a need to do so. So while some of us have served in various military units, others of us have demonstrated, written to our representatives in Congress and to the president, and participated in peace groups, all with the aim of seeking an end to war. Our family embraces all of us, even though we may not all share the same views about war and military service.

One of my cousins is the Jesuit priest who, while serving as chaplain to the U.S. Marine Corps, celebrated the first mass said atop Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi during World War II. One of my uncles was shot down in a B-17 bomber  over Germany in that same war, and another, who went ashore with the troops on D-Day, was the first U.S. Army doctor to go into Dachau  and treat those who survived the horrors of that Nazi death camps.

My 88-year-old father served in World War II and is a proud veteran of the U.S. Navy.  Several of my cousins served in Vietnam, and my youngest daughter was stationed in Kuwait with the U.S. Air Force before and after 9/11.  Today one of my nephews, who serves in the U.S. Navy, is taking his medical corpsman training and very likely will be sent off to the Middle East.

But until now, every one we've sent has come home safely. (That B-17 in which my uncle was flying somehow managed to limp to Sweden, and my uncle spent the rest of the war interned there, learning to love Swedish food and beautiful Swedish women. He's now 92 and still very much with the family on all counts).

However earlier this week we received the terrible news that one of our cousins, a 20-year-old soldier from Eastern Washington's farm country, will be coming home in a flag-draped casket. As I type this, even now the tears start running down my face. I'm thinking not only of this young life that was lost, but of the enormous hole his death leaves in his parents' hearts.

We Scandinavian-Americans are somewhat undemonstrative and have trouble talking about our feelings in public. But to lose one of our kids pushes us past that psychic barrier and leaves us open, vulnerable, washed by waves of grief. One of my sons died when he was in his 20s, and even now, 18 years later, his loss is fresh and horrible. And his death was only an accident caused by bad judgment and treacherous winter-hiking conditions, not the result of a horrible war none of us ever wanted.

The young man we've lost, Matthew J. Emerson, was killed when he was thrown from a Humvee in the city of Mosul in Iraq's Ninewah province in September 18. The town is near the Tigris River in Northern Iraq.  He was a member of the U.S. Army's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. Matt was an infantryman in an army division with roots that go all the way back to the American Civil War. According to reports I received from family members, the Humvee in which he was riding was struck by an improvised explosive device (IED).   

He graduated from Grandview High School in 2005, where he played on the football team, and was, by all accounts, a gentle, friendly and generous-hearted young man. He was a great fan of Washington State University Cougars and the San Francisco 49ers football teams.  He loved his pickup truck, video games,the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and the band Metallica.  He leaves behind his parents, one sister and one brother, and a very large extended family. He will be buried along side his materhal grandfather in the Prosser Cemetery not far from the Yakima River.  His family has put together a memorial website with a number of photos, which can be seen here. 

Here are several photos of Matt in military uniform, and one of his sad sad homecoming. Please remember him and all who have died  in this horrible war, regardless of political, religious or military affiliation. Tomorrow I will take a  photo of Matthew and a plackard bearing his name and will attach it to one of the crosses--he was a member of the Church of the Nazarene--at the Iraq War Memorial near the Lafayette BART station. There his marker will join those of the other 3792 Americans who, to date, have been kiled in this war.  Last night Matthew's name was read at before the mourners' kaddish was recited at Adas Israel Synagogue in Washington DC. And I know that around the nation, countless Pagan families lit candles this week in Matthew's memory and prayed for comfort for his family.  May Matt return in love, and, as we Pagans say, what is remembered lives.
Large_matthew_emerson_image Matt2

One of those great San Francisco views

I've spent the past week in an office in San Francisco's financial district. The building, at 345 California Street, has one of the most amazing views I've ever seen. The office building is usual, with 10 floors of a luxury hotel, the San Francisco Mandarin Oriental hotel, on top of 35 floors of office space. I've been up on the top office floor, and have a very hard time pulling myself away from the windows and the view they command. See what I mean?
2_transamerica_pyramid_from_345_cal
The Transamerica pyramid is slightly to the left of center. This is, to date, the most distinctive-looking building in the San Francisco skyline. The exterior of 345 California, while interesting, is no where near as architecturally adventuresome as the pyramid. If you go to this site, you can see a photo of the Transamerica pyramid, the two "tweezer towers" of 345 California, and the brown-colored Bank of American building sticking up through the fog. 

In my photo you can also see  Telegraph Hill topped by Coit Tower, and, to the left, some of the high-rise apartment buildings on Nob Hill. The small island just to the left of Coit Tower is Alcatraz Island. Today Alcatraz is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area administered by the National Park Service. 

Here's another shot from the same window at 345 California. The building with the stepped top and the large flat building to its left are both part of the Embarcadero Center, a 10-acre retail, office and hotel complex on the edge of the Financial District. Rockefeller Center was the model for the Embarcadero Center, and, in fact, David Rockefeller was one of the Embarcadero Center developers.
Embarcadero_center_from_345_calfior
Here's the entrance to 345 California. It seems to me that this entryway has shown up in a film or two. I think some of the exterior shots in Class Action were set here.
345_california_exterior
I have a mild degree of acrophobia, so even though I knew I had a heavy glass window in front of me, it was still scary to shoot this photo looking down from the south side of the building.
Long_way_down
But in the future, San Franciscans will be able to look down from far greater heights, once the Transbay Transit Center is built south of Market Street (and no, we don't say "So-Ma" here, despite real estate developers' love of the phrase).The proposed tower will be 1200 feet high, making it the tallest building on the West Coast,  putting it within 200 feet of the Empire State Building. So maybe someday, if the project doesn't get bogged down in the political wrangling that has delayed the reconstruction of the eastern span of theSan Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, I may be able to shoot a photo from the top of this huge tower. But for now, I remain thrilled at the view I saw from 345 California.