A Fighting Man

“John’s Bar and Grill” is how my brother answered his phone last night.  The phone near his bed where he is hooked up to oxygen and a breathing machine in the new hospice in Tucson.

To our shame, my husband and I found it remarkable that brother Jay is so positive and upbeat.  He is a career military man, a soldier.  No warrior gives up; he fights the enemy to his last breath.  Jay is being a true soldier.

Stout heart won fair lady.  His wife Rose is determined, focused, loving, thinking only of her husband.  She shows up for him dressed as if going to a wedding or a fancy dinner party.  Hair, makeup, dress, high heels, jewelry.  She also is positive and upbeat in his presence.  She is a wife worthy of a warrior. She will not have her man fighting his last battle thinking he married a wimp.  She is there to support and encourage, to stand beside him.

Jay’s military buddies have been coming by to see him.  They talk about work, not about the obvious.

Jay is thinking of life, of others, of his duty.  His situation and attitude  resemble battle scenes written by Kipling about British soldiers pinned down by overwhelming enemy forces in India.  There is not a word of self-pity, regret, no bemoaning fate, no blaming other people or God.  What Jay presents is cheerful steadfastness while doing what God has set before him to do.

God Bless him.

A Real Circus

Saturday evening, thanks to a Very Generous Friend, three of us went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Alegria in Syracuse.  What an enjoyable, eye-opening, entertaining experience!

It was my first circus.  The sheer masterful physicality and incredibly complex technical aspects were more intriguing and as beautiful as the  fascinating costuming and music.  Colors, textures,  light and shadow,  layers upon layers of movement and sound.

Gymnasts, singers, musicians, contortionists, fire spinners, trapeze artists, silly skits, graceful, beautiful bungee cord and metal hoop dancing, a blizzard of paper snow.

I bought the Alegria DVD to share with family and friends.  It was filmed in Sydney, Australia a few years ago in a very large space packed with people.  We have watched 30 minutes of it so far.

Truthfully, what we saw and experienced Saturday was as good as and in most ways better than what is on record.  It seems to me that this show has been allowed to change and morph and develop as time and people have changed and moved.   Here is a review from the Albany show.  Alegria has been performing for 25 years!

The performers were obviously so pleased to be performing, so happy to be in front of an appreciative audience.  They were young, in their first physical flush, and proud that they could amaze and entertain and be paid to do what they enjoyed.  They were also mostly not from this country, so one wonders about available opportunities and freedoms here versus where they are from.

I wonder if Cirque du Soleil is the place snapping up new circus-type talent in the world today?

The set was huge, and complex.  Safety was in the forefront: I think one kind of clown (ridiculously costumed and masked persons wearing lots of extra padding to make them look fat and old) served the same function as clowns in a rodeo: they were there to ensure and help with safety.  The skills exhibited were near Olympian level.

To think everything gets broken down, packed up and moved to a new city on an almost weekly basis!  Feeding everyone, washing costumes, hauling it all, practicing in between times, what an undertaking.

Beautiful and Excellent

Those are the words the girl and I will be studying for a while.  They describe the public presentation recitation she gave at the State Fair yesterday in the State 4H Public Presentation competition.

This past spring she was required by her 4H leader and her mother to choose a subject and style of participation for the 4H public presentation in this county.  After exhaustive, excruciating deliberation she finally decided to choose four poems about horses from an anthology of horse poetry she found at the book sale and give a recitation.

A recitation includes an introduction, descriptions and discussions of what you are reciting and a conclusion.  She did all the writing and preparing with a modicum of motherly input.  She did well enough at the local level to go on to area presentations and did well enough there to be chosen for state level.

She had to present her recitation at the local, little fair in July where she received some good advise from adults.  A former State Gold Medal winner came and worked with her one afternoon on gestures, of which she had none.

She worked on her speech and wrote it out incorporating the gestures.  I had minor editing input.  I did listen and time her presentation frequently towards the end.  She gave it to relatives and friends–anyone we could coax to listen to her.

Yesterday about noon she gave her presentation in an incredibly noisy area, wearing a head mic for the first time in her life.  She did a superb job.  So superb that she was awarded a gold on her certificate.  It is the equivalent of a blue ribbon.  Her point total was only 6 shy of a perfect score.  It was totally unexpected.  Several persons who heard her in July said they were astounded at the progress she had made in the interval between then and yesterday.

There are three days of presentations for students across the state.  The last day is Saturday.  Then awards will be handed out for excellence in the whole population of  presenters this year.

She did so well yesterday she will not be allowed to come back at a state level with a recitation ever again, but will have to choose from other forms of public presentations: speech, demonstration, illustrated talk, or dramatic presentation.

Some Things Really Do Change

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

We’ve all heard that phrase one way or another:  the more things change, the more they stay the same.   And we can all name examples.  Politics, for one.

But enough of that.  Here are two stories showing how that phrase is sometimes not true.

When we took Isaac to college yesterday, we went early, because he wished it.  Therefore we sat in the car, in a line of cars, waiting with all the other families who listened to their first-year children who wished to come early (to beat the rush don’t you know) so they could get into their dorm rooms before everyone else.  It had been obvious to Isaac that we knew nothing about the process.  His friend Sam knew.  So we sat there for half an hour.

When we arrived at the designated unloading spot we made fun of the family which had a Hertz Rental Moving Van for their child’s stuff!  What were they thinking?  Maybe they were the first of their family ever to go to college.

After unpacking the car,  the kids got a trolley and guarded the stuff, and the parents went,  parked the car,  and walked back.

Then we all shuffled his stuff into his room, made him fill out the form detailing the degree of soundness in his room, made him unpack the two suitcases and cloth carrying bags so we could take them home, and after all this parental harassment, walked with him to the large gym where he went to his college table and got given free stuff: shirts, a backpack bag, a calendar, a planner, a highlighter, etc.  We walked around the gym looking at all the tables, ate a few bites of free food and then he walked us to the car, where we said our good-byes and he ran away.  Literally.  Smiling a Cheshire Cat smile.

It took us less than 1.5 hours.  It was now one hour into the three hours given for his designated living area to come unload.

And when we walked past the waiting-in-car-lines parking lot, guess how many cars were there, waiting?  None.  Zero.  Zip.

Huh.  What about that?

__________________

When my father got ready to go to college, in 1947, his father took him early Monday morning to the pawnbroker in downtown Rochester because my grandfather knew that the dealer gave a 10% discount on the first sale of the day.  Grandpa bought his son a used leather satchel.

Wednesday morning of that week, my grandparents dropped their youngest child and only son off on the intersection of two main roads.  It took him three days to hitchhike to Kansas State University.  The satchel was his only piece of luggage.

It didn’t seem to harm him a bit.

Next-to Last Supper

for Isaac at home was Wednesday night.  John , Audrey, and Heather came bringing the wonderful little plum cakes and their attendant chocolate cram sauce from Baking with Julia.

Audrey, Suzanne and I went to see Julia and Julia a week or so ago.  I read My Life in France in the weeks before–and not the movie tie-in version either!  It is a wonderful biography.  Cooking was what Julia found to “have something to do“  since they were unable to have children and her husband did not wish to adopt.  Her infertility makes me feel quite simpatico towards her and her work.  That and her love for butter.

In addition to cakes we ate

-Sungold tomatoes, both whole and cut in half for salad which could be dressed with Balsamic/Rice vinegar Good Seasons Italian home mix

-a finely sliced large Romanian striped cucumber with Balsamic vinegar

-sweet corn too large to eat off the cob, so it was cooked, cut off the cobs, and then mixed with chopped onion and tomato and cooked in butter.

-finely sliced garlic and kale cooked in olive oil and butter

-venison flank steaks cut about 1/3 inch thick and mixed with sesame oil, ginger, white pepper, salt and brown sugar then allowed to sit all day in the fridge before coming out an hour or so before being quickly pan sauteed.

Tonight I think we will have hot dogs for the first time this summer.

His Room, But not for long

And aren’t you glad you can not see what the rest of it looks like?  He has to be at school Sunday.

Longer Than

Forgot to mention that a couple weeks ago we passed the mark in time where Hawthorne has been part of our family longer than he has been anywhere else.

He continues to change, though not as dramatically.  He loves his morning runs, chasing his toys, eating, being loved up.  He was especially intrigued by the residual skunk smell on the traps and in the back of the truck and jumps up in to explore that region each day since then.

He is such a good dog.  Except when he is not.  But I guess that is true for most of us humans, too.