Time Passes!

Dad's family 1944. Only his brother is missing. I think that may be because he was away in the Navy. This is during WWII, of course. My dad was rejected for conscription a few times for health. Eventually they took him, though. Except for his brother (who was not yet married) this is his family. I wonder if the picture was taken to send to his brother. None of the sisters are married at this time. His youngest sister, on the ground with my mother and infant sister, is no more than 14.

I have quite a collection of pictures (scanned from prints and originally digital) on my computer and various backup drives. I have several computers on my desk (don't ask) and when they are on they frequently go into screen saver mode and I have them flashing up pictures from a few collections.

When I look at old pictures I can't help but think about how much time has passed and how many people have passed with time. If I see the picture above I immediately think: they are all gone except that baby and teenager. The baby is now my almost 71-year-old sister. The teenager is my Aunt Cappy, featured yesterday. Only my granddad didn't survive to be in my life. But my grandmother, Dad, Mom and the other four sisters are gone now, too.

So much happened to these people. Eight more children would be born amongst three of the women in this picture. They would work and struggle and laugh and cry. (The Ball family, in fact, has a tendency to laugh until they cry.) The children would grow, the people in this picture would grow old, the children would have children and those children would have children. A couple of children would die before their parents.

This tendency of mine to look at who has been lost in pictures as they flash by doesn't feel morbid. It feels like celebrating lives lived and the struggle inherent in life. Let's see...there's a picture of my friend Al on the beach at Normandy, my mother with a snowman, two of our dogs (they are gone, too), my mom with us on the Capitol steps when we are children, my Aunts Mary and Dottie at my sister's wedding in 1965. And there's my friend Charles giving me a hug, So recognizable in these pictures on my screens but no longer in the world. Does this make me sad? No just nostalgic and maybe accepting that one is just a pawn in a long sputtering line of humanity trying hard to stop time but failing. Always eventually succumbing.

Merry Christmas

FFP poses with a stuffed Santa at a party at the Headliners Club.

The Visible Woman...celebrates.

There are no more presents to open. I got my present earlier and I love it. FFP liked his new muffler and umbrella (or so he said). It's not the one in this picture because I didn't let him open until Christmas Eve and this was the day before. 

We got up around 7:30. At that moment when a hot coffee from the Capresso machine sounded better than staying in bed. I sorted the ads to throw away out of the paper. Just glanced at a couple. I have no intention of shopping after Christmas, but I like to see what they are pushing.

Yesterday we walked down to SoCo and ate at a favorite spot, Snack Bar. I had a salad of avocado, pineapple and quinoa and FFP had the same and we shared an order of crispy Brussels sprouts although I ate most of them. There were lots of people down there, presumably getting last minute gifts. We only went in to Off the Wall, Tesoros Trading Company and South Congress Books. At South Congress Books we bought a book of jazz essays by Phillip Larkin called All What Jazz: A Record Diary  Who knew he wrote about jazz? And a biography of Peggy Lee. I guess you could say we bought ourselves some presents. We refused the gift bags offered however. FFP came home and immediately started reading the Peggy Lee book. I wanted to take up the Phillip Larkin book because I'd started one essay in the store and it sounded great. But I'm going to finish Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch first. It's my bedside book. (I read papers in my chair in front of the TV and while eating.) I finish books, but slowly, since that's usually my only book reading time.

We came home and finally decided to stay in for the evening. We watched Le Notti Bianche on a disk rented from Netflix. We listened to an extra on the disk which was a reading of the Dostoevsky story it was based on. (I love this movie. The way it looks. The way they film flashbacks. The atmosphere of the streets.) I read papers all the while, missing this and that in the film and reading I'm sure. We ate a dinner of what was in the refrigerator. And we had drinks. I had two lovely Manhattans on the rocks, mixed by FFP. On Monday at our club party they had Bloody Marys and I had two and they were delicious. I think FFP even had one. (We did walk to the party!) FFP started thinking about mixing one and had to run around the neighborhood and find some mix. He tried the store in the building but it was closed early for the holiday and so he went about four blocks to a liquor store he called to see if they had it.

So we celebrated with cocktails and an old movie and reading. Happy Christmas Eve to us. It was nice, actually.

Early in the evening I called my Aunt Cappy on the phone. She lives near Dallas and my cousin and his wife and one of their daughters and her family live not too far away. However, I think everyone was in Taos for Christmas. My cousin in Houston has a wife and mother-in-law not doing that well. We don't like to drive IH35 this time of year. So there she was, alone. (Her husband died in January. She couldn't attend his memorial in February because she was in the hospital with pneumonia. I helped her return his ashes to his native state of Maine in the summer and she did quite well on the trip.) She said she'd saved our gift for Christmas morning. It wasn't much: some ballpoint pens in a retro style and a package of note cards with a typewriter as decoration. (She still has a typewriter and uses it occasionally!) She said, yes, she was alone. Then: "I spent lots of time alone in the barracks before I was married." (She was a career Navy woman. She married a Marine within a few years of both of their retirements.)

I thought of a Christmas I spent alone, before I was married. My parents went to Colorado where they had grandchildren. My aunts who lived nearby (the older sisters of my Aunt Cappy who never married) had gone to West Texas where there were two other sisters, married with children. I didn't get an invitation from anyone I worked with. It was a sort of wonderful experience, actually. I had presents from my parents and sister and probably some from my aunts and I saved them for Christmas morning. I opened them and then later called Colorado to thank them for the presents (and hear the chaos of the kids and their presents in the background). I don't remember any of my gifsts except one. It was a pencil sharpener. A crank-style one, heavy duty. Instead of having to be screwed to a shelf like in our schools at that time it had a lever that activated a powerful suction cup to stabilize it. That was back when I dreamed of writing a book on yellow pads with Number 2 pencils. Back before computers for the home. (I programmed computers at the time, having my code typed onto punch cards for the compiler by a room full of ladies. Yes they were all ladies.) I never wrote a book on yellow pads with pencils. I never wrote a book, period. I kept the pencil sharpener for a long time, however.

That Christmas I made myself some coffee, maybe a little breakfast of bacon and eggs. I got the Dallas Morning News and I turned on my stereo and listened to the Beatles or something while reading every single page and section of the paper. If I'm not mistaken, I may not have owned a TV at that time.

Like my Aunt Cappy, I can deal with being alone. Even on the holiday when it seems most people gather in large groups. But I almost never am alone and I almost never was at Christmas before I married either.

Today we are relaxing with coffee and papers. We may have a walk this morning. Probably have some chicken and veggie tacos for lunch. Then we join a family gathering for dinner and drinking. 

Family Moments

Families can be strife and misery and even the best can be tense as children grow and assert themselves in new ways and as the tragedies and disagreement pulls against the natural and nurtured links.

But there are little moments when the family seems like the most wonderful refuge from a cruel world.

At Thanksgiving two of my cousins and their families and one of my aunts joined FFP and I and Dad and my niece and her family (in from Colorado to help my dad) for Thanksgiving at Dad's because he couldn't travel. The meal came out great with contributions brought distances or purchased and then put together in a kitchen unfamiliar to all of us. Above you see my great niece with my cousin's 22-year-old son. She fell head over heels for her cousin of some sort (I can never figure out all that ordinal number and removed stuff). Having an older, grown but still young, relative pay attention to a three-year-old is one of the amazing things about families.

There was another moment in the last couple of days when I thought "that's why families work." My niece and her husband were sitting on a couch and their three-year-old daughter (above) was snuggling between them in that way little kids have of getting secure by getting as close to one or more parent as possible. My dad was in his chair (his 'throne' he calls it) and I was sitting nearby. We were laughing and joking, all comfortable with each other. It felt like moments during holidays and such when you were just sitting around and drinking coffee, maybe playing games or just having a conversation, secure in your family and its inside jokes and confident that we can all grow a little older and weather what comes and still be a family.

I Don't Like Cupcakes

Holidailies is over! It's the last day. I wrote an entry for thirty-three days! (When I get this published, but actually I started before that.) Does this feel like an accomplishment? No. I have, some time in the past, written an entry for every day of the year. I did enjoy the structure, the occasional push that a writing prompt gave me and, of course, the gift of other people's writing and ideas. So thanks Jette, thanks Chip. Let's hope we find ourselves doing this again when holidays 2009 roll around.

I'll keep writing, of course. Perhaps with less frequency. I hope to find time to read a bunch of the contributions to Holidailies and give my few readers a few links to interesting things in other peoples' heads. I haven't found enough time to do this reading. And now it's, ugh, tax time and other obligations loom.

[Ed. Note: So what's with the title. And the picture. Cupcakes??? LB: I'm getting to that.]

Today's Holidailies writing prompt is 'Epiphany.' It is Epiphany, a Christian holiday having something to do with the manifestation of Christ in the person of the Magi. Since all the Holidailies writing prompts begin with an initial cap (the site is run by a writer and such things are not sloppily done) it is hard to say if the Christian meaning was intended. In fact, did Holidailies run to Jan. 6 just for this happy coincidence of this writing prompt? Anyway, the word epiphany, initial letter lower case, is where we are going today. To me it's a sudden feeling that makes something (or everything) clear.

I've had a few of these flashes. Hundreds. They are identifiable to me because from that moment forward these realizations changed my perceptions. They didn't necessarily change my behavior, they just provided a lens or filter through which certain things in the future would always be processed.

Cupcakes are all the rage. This happened outside Austin first. I read about cupcake shops in New York City. Then Austin got a cupcake trailer on South Congress and now there is a cupcake shop on Burnet Road. (Its giant cupcake is pictured above. The shop will probably be the Austin, Texas Daily Photo tomorrow.) I did not have an epiphany about cupcakes. Rather it was about a larger class of iced cakes. I don't really like cake. I don't care for a lot of desserts, really. One day I was at one of those office parties and there were some fine cakes, not just sheet cake with sugary icing, but Italian Cream Cake maybe. And as the pieces got passed around I just skipped it. Because I love dip, chips, cheese and a good cobbler. I like pure sugar candy like those little hearts you get at Valentine's with messages on them (like I DIG U). I like coffee ice cream although I don't usually want other flavors. Gelato with a shot of espresso? Yeah!! But one day I realized I didn't care for every dessert. So why eat them? I mean sometimes you are hungry and the only choice is a hamburger or something. But you never have to eat dessert becuase there isn't anything else. After that I usually passed up the cake at office birthday parties. Sometimes I went to the office kitchen and made nachos afterwards. So this isn't a story about beating calories or losing weight. It's a story of learning to embrace and trust what you like.

I've had other epiphanies, too. Most of my life I was trying to get things into this wonderful, impossible static state of neat organization and correctness. This goal did drive me to do things that were good, I suppose. I kept books for FFP's business by hand in ledger books for five years, balancing everything to the penny, for example, and I think that it did help us through those years. We knew what money we had. Back in those days, vendors would give you a discount to pay ten days from billing instead of thirty. We made our margins on these 2% discounts, but you had to keep a tight rein on all the money coming and going. But I digress. I agonized over every decision about how to account for something, every line on a tax return. One day I was working on something and I thought "Well, this could be the way it should be accounted for according to the IRS, I'm not really sure. It isn't a very material amount. Why don't I go with my best guess and, if they want to audit me, they can change it." This was very freeing. And, no, this isn't a story about how I went from there down a slippery slope to running a Ponzi scheme like Madoff. Nope, I just finally gained the perspective to understand that there was black and white but also gray areas. I would just do my best to do things correctly and follow rules. And understand that I might do it wrong. Similarly, I try to keep track of everything, but I realize that things will get lost and misplaced. So be it. I think I just realized that the world is messier and moving faster than I could control. Balancing a set of books to the penny, by hand, month after month, gives you the feeling that you could do everything just right. But it's a false notion.

My last epiphany was much more recent. It concerns my responses to certain people in my life. Not those closest to me, good friends, FFP, parental units. But some people outside that circle. People I'd felt obligations to that were silly. People who were more than capable of taking care of themselves (particularly financially) who imposed these obligations in my head. They weren't trying to control me or ask anything of me. Not really. But I had a flash one day, talking to one of them on the phone that I didn't have to really worry about them, that I was on my own and they would never be there for me in any non-trivial way but on the flip side, they could probably get along fine without my help and I should be worrying more about me and those close to me who did need and deserve my help. It was complicated but very freeing. It didn't really change anything I did. It just changed my feeling about it.

I guess I have these all the time. Flashes of perception that add another nuance to my approach to life. I think today's is this: things get done when the time is right. It was too wet to play tennis today and my plan was to go after tennis to my dad's to take care of some things. So I've blogged, drunk coffee and discussed some financial decisions and movies with FFP. Now it's time to move forward. Do things, however imperfectly, the best I can, when I can, concentrating on the people I should. And not eating cupcakes.

And I leave Holidailies with that, um, wisdom. Thanks for following along.

Nostalgia for a Camera

Yesterday I was writing about how we sometimes want everything new and refreshed if not replaced. But we have a strong nostalgia for the past way of doing things. People collect tintypes and old photos, even if they are of people or places they never knew. People collect LPs, swearing they sound different (or that changing the record is part of the charm or that the cover art and liner notes in that large size are incredible).

It's been all over the news that Polaroid is going to discontinue its instant film. There was a piece in The Times, I think, and one on CBS Sunday Morning today.

I don't even use film these days and I gave away, finally, my Polaroid Automatic 101 camera that I acquired in 1964 or so during the great downsizing of 2008. I used Freecycle to find a camera collector who took some old digital cameras and wrote me about working on them and then I offered that camera to him. He claimed in an e-mail (I never met him) that he fixed a pinhole in the bellows and worked on it.

But Polaroid film and the ownership of that camera (see above picture for one virtually identical being peddled by an ebay trader) had a great influence on my photography vision as well as my relationship to and desire for gadgetry.

Examples of the photography with that camera are in lots of albums I still have and I have scanned quite a few in the service of online journals and blogs like this. as well as to do various family projects. Today, though, I offer the example below. It is a picture of my brother-in-law in 1967. He is smoking a cigarette in my parents' home. He did not yet have children. He was a lieutenant in the Air Force, if I'm not mistaken. I do think there is a difference in the colors, the skin tones especially, in these old prints developed instantly with a package of emulsions given sixty seconds to do their work after being triggered by compression between stainless steel rollers.


That camera! It was top of the line (trimmed with leather and stainless steel). I had two lens adapters with gadgets to put over the viewfinder to make close-ups or portraits. I mostly took portraits of people. Especially after my brother-in-law and sister adopted a daughter in 1968 and my sister had her second daughter in 1970. I wanted the camera for months, maybe a year. I got it while I was still in high school, maybe Christmas 1964. My mother surprised me with it. I think it blew the Christmas budget. (I think it cost about $120 which was real money then.) I had been cadging Green Stamps (remember those) to try to get one. I had, I think, thirteen books of Green Stamps. I think it took forty or fifty to get one. That Christmas my mother convinced me I'd never get enough of these trading stamps. You got them from retailers, mostly the grocery store, and pasted them in books and there was a catalog of gifts you could get. Anyway, she convinced me it was futile and used the stamps to buy other Christmas presents. And she secretly found the money somewhere to give me the camera. I took so many pictures, finding the money somehow for film and those crazy exploding flash bulbs. (The gadgets I got had an extra plastic diffuser for the flash to soften the explosion for close-ups and portraits.)

I used that camera for a good decade, I think. And I knew all the ins and out. I knew to keep the stainless steel rollers clean and I could load film and pop in flash bulbs with my eyes closed. I pulled the film out with a firm, confident motion. I could count to a minute while taking another picture. I deftly folded the emulsion waste and discarded it. (Much later I would use this waste with an artist friend's help to make artsy transfer prints by using the film to take pictures of slides with a gadget that used a similar film.)

I knew that camera and its limitations and mine. I have had six digital cameras (maybe five, but, I think, six). Sure I know a bit about them and have learned to use some editing capabilities on the computer for the resultant pile of pixels. But I never learned all the ins and outs of those cameras. I never coveted owning them like I did that Polaroid 101. I'm not sure what that means, but I think it means that flat packs of magic film and exploding flashbulbs are things I experienced that the young folks can't begin to understand. I think they probably blow through gadgets before they really learn how to use them. Just as I do today. Time is compressed. But nothing can take that memory away and, now that I've floated my brother-in-law's image on the Internet (probably not for the first time) the Polaroid colors and his dream-like smoker's state take on a new life albeit in pixel-land.

[Ed. Note: Tomorrow is the penultimate day of Holidailies and the writing prompt today is "Your favorite Holidailies post(s) this year (yours or someone else's)." Which is a great prompt as is tomorrow's: "The One Thing I Want for Holidailies 2009" and the last day's, appropriately, "Epiphany." I hope that I can write about some of this in the coming days. I need to do some reading before declaring favorite(s) and I need to work on my idea for epipany to make it sound less, um, bitter. As to what I want for Holidailies 2009, well one always fears making a 'feature creature' out of a bit of programming that is pretty great the way it is.]

Seeking the Cinnamon Roll

These cinnamon rolls were at the Farmer's Market on Saturday. They looked close enough to my grandmother's that I bought one. The guy helping me at the empanada stall that sold them ask if I wanted frosting. "No, I thought, we never had frosting." "No," I said. I heated the thing up in my microwave and ate it. It was good. It was closer to Deedy's (that was our nickname for my maternal grandmother) than, say, store-bought one or the ones that Upper Crust (I love them, but not for this) purvey around town that somehow contain so much butter or something that we call them 'gut bombs.'

But this one, enjoyable though it was, was not like my grandmother's offerings. Maybe it was all in the dough recipe. She made these transcendental homemade rolls for holidays. She made a traditional yeast rising dough. (Left to warm and rise on the part of the stove where the pilot light was, remember those? With a dish towel over the bowl.) And she made dozens and dozens of rolls from the dough. They tasted sweet themselves as yeast rolls will. (Come to think of it, no one comes close to her recipe on those either, not even Threadgill's whose giant yeast rolls have to be seen to be believed and taste sweet in that yeasty way.)

I think my grandmother made rolls often, eschewing the 'brown and serve' ones at the store that my busy mother resorted to serving. (Not that Deedy wasn't busy. She had her elderly husband to care for, her chickens, babysitting us, babysitting other peoples' kids, making clothes for half the town, all that scratch cooking to do for all of us.)

But at holidays? She set aside some dough. Put butter, sugar and cinnamon between layers and rolled out cinnamon rolls that came out as big flat wheels of delight, just cooked enough, just doughy enough, especially in the center. We ate so many (and the rolls, too, sopping the homemade turkey giblet gravy off our plates) that I don't know how we arrived at adulthood as fairly skinny kids. (Yeah, later I gained weight easily. I'm wearing one of the rolls above now!)

I remember one Christmas when my cousins and I were watching her make the cinnamon rolls and clamoring for more of the butter, sugar and cinnamon. But she just smiled and ignored us.

One year I decided I would learn to make these rolls from the master. I never did, of course. Baking is the worst of cooking for me because of the accuracy required. I don't have the patience and concentration. From this session when I tried to learn, I remember only one thing. When she added the yeast to the warm water she 'hid' it. She almost filled a measuring cup with some flour and then put the yeast there and put a bit more flour in. This she added to the warm water.

"Why do you hide the yeast in the flour?" I asked.

"My mother always did," she said.

Of course, yeast is delicate. If the water was too warm, it would kill it before it could do its work. The flour coat meant that there was more margin for error in the warm water, I think. The science of baking is interesting. But like I said, I didn't and don't have the patience.

My mom and my sister both actually made rolls and cinnamon rolls and used the time-honored recipe from Deedy for a while. Then I think they switched to something easier. And they stopped making the cinnamon rolls. And then Mom died and my sister became disabled and I doubt she attempts it now. And, really, it was good but never quite the same.

During holidays of old, the presents sometimes were a disappointment and sometimes Dad wasn't there because he was working, but Deedy usually cooked the perfect meal that was everything I wanted. Turkey (I was a white meat kid, then), homemade cornbread dressing, homemade giblet gravy, those rolls, those cinnamon rolls. I'm sure there was an array of things I avoided like green beans or cranberry sauce or salads, too. (I was a picky eater as a child.)

Oh, those cinnamon rolls. Never to be duplicated. Even if the same recipe was scrupulously followed by someone, it would, of course, never be the same.

It's a Wonderful Life

Did I mention that I saw this radio play of "It's a Wonderful Life" over at the theater at Penn Field (Austin Playhouse King Stage) Saturday night? It is the story of George Bailey but done as if six actors were performing it as a radio play in the 1940's. They took on multiple characters (Mr. Potter is also one of George Bailey's kids, not to mention the head Angel, helping Clarence!) The cast did the sound effects like on old radio. Its run is finished now so this isn't a review. (In fact, it wasn't on my radar until one of the gals I was going out with on Saturday suggested it and found that they did have a few tickets for that performance.)

Anyway, I like that story because I'm rather fascinated by the way chance and actions conspire to make life what it is. The premise of "It's a Wonderful Life" is not that George Bailey has a great life. He really doesn't. His dreams were thwarted. (Oh, you might count the wife and kids in the drafty house as a great life, but that's you.) No, to me, the fascinating premise is that George gets to see the world with him erased, as if nothing changed except that one little thing never happened: the accident of his father's particular sperm and his mother's particular egg getting joined. He doesn't see the aftermath if he succeeds in jumping off the bridge and drowning. No. He gets to see the world truly without him.

Just as an aside, before I continue, there was an article in The New York Times this week about the movie and one man's experience with it. There is a funny bit in there theorizing that maybe life would have been more wonderful without George.

So. Have you ever thought about that? What if you hadn't been conceived? You weren't an aborted fetus or a baby or child killed in a tragic accident. You just were not there, never thought of, literally never conceived.

It does change things, doesn't it? Maybe my parents wouldn't have had a second child. If my sister was their only child, things would have been different all along the way. Maybe my mother would have gone back to school four or five years earlier when my sister started school instead of when I did. They could have given my sister more things and avoiding sending a second kid to college, gotten financially solvent sooner.

When my parents grew old, however, and their support system in North Texas was disappearing, they wouldn't have moved to Austin to be near the baby child and get some help from her. They might have moved to be near my sister in Colorado, but I doubt it. My sister had a cerebral aneurysm rupture in 1998. At that point I bet they would still have hoped that my brother-in-law would retire and he and my sister would move to Texas. My sister had a long recovery and many set-backs. She can do many things but she is handicapped by the hemorrhagic stroke and the other strokes that followed. The first time my parents visited her, in March 1999 in rehab in Denver, I took them there, worried about them being in the snow and ice. They might have tried to move there all the same. My sister had children and, starting in 2000, grandchildren there. My mother would still have had Multiple Myeloma, I suppose, and I suppose it would have been eventually diagnosed. Certainly she would probably still have died in 2002. Although one never knows.

So I see my Dad. Alone in that house in the Dallas suburb? Moved to Colorado where the thin air bothered his breathing after a few weeks? But, who knows, maybe better off. Maybe without the burden of another kid, my parents would be strong and vigorous and both still alive. Who's to say?

The other close to home thing is wondering what my husband of thirty-plus years would be doing. He says if he hadn't found me he would have never married. But I wonder. He might not have started his business less than a year after we married if he hadn't had a partner to pay bills. He might not have been there to take a call from a young man at UT selling gray market IBM PCs and do advertising for him as his business morphed into a build-to-order and sell direct PC firm. I'm betting that he wouldn't have bought a bigger house that same year he started the business. He might not have purchased a building to run his agency during the Dell era. The doctor who now owns that building and the house we bought that year would probably have put his practice some other place.

I wonder if the man who never met me because I didn't exist would have ended up in a condo downtown. My bet is that he would have married someone else who was smart and driven but wanted children and ended up in Tarrytown with some way too intelligent smart ass kids that he nevertheless loved unmercifully. Or maybe he would have left the company where we met, but not started an ad agency in Austin and, instead, moved to some other city. As an only child he would be looking back to Austin at his very elderly parents and trying to see that they were all right from a distance.

Then there are the jobs I had. I wouldn't have been there to write certain lines of code, to create certain bugs and avoid or fix others. I wouldn't have been there to think up software ideas or squash others' visions. It would have been different. Better? Worse? Barely noticeable? Hard to say.

I don't really think the world would be that different without me especially once you move out of a pretty tight circle around me. But little things would be different. There would be one less site on Holidailies. (Or more spookily someone else doing a site called Visible Woman! But that would be an entirely different site anyway.)

Well, um, that was an instructive line of thought. But since I do exist I have to clean the condo and go have lunch and dinner with friends who would be doing something else today. In fact, one of them would probably not live in Austin if we hadn't met forty years ago or so. So they'd be doing something someplace else. We are having lunch with Dad who wouldn't live in Austin. Whoa, it's just too weird.

Floating

I don't seem to be connected to anything. Oh, I have my duties, my schedule. Today I was talked into playing tennis. Although playing four times a week is something I do not need to be doing. And I hate to disappoint my regular social friends the other three days. I am a registered sub for this team, though, and one of them had to go help a relative impacted by the hurricane so I relented. Then my dad told me yesterday morning that he had some edema in his legs. We decided he wasn't bad off enough to go to the emergency room, but needed to go to the doctor today. I told him I'd cancel tennis, but he improved some so we are going to try for the doctor this afternoon. We arranged to have dinner with friends we haven't seen in ages this evening. And so it goes.

Yesterday was social mostly. I did have my computer guy come by and install a fast Firewire drive on my Mac in an attempt to keep the VMware image backed up with Time Machine. Otherwise, we did our dog sitting duties for our god dog Zoey and took a walk and ate breakfast at Halcyon. In the afternoon we drove up to UT and saw a concert in the foyer of the Blanton museum and then came home and walked over to Long Center for a fund-raiser called Octo-Tea. A group of folks raise money for a fund (called the Paul Kirby fund) that helps people living with HIV-AIDS by providing emergency assistance for rent, meds, utilities, whatever. The group has raised over a million dollars over some years by having a loose band of people party on their own nickel or donations or both and charge attendees a fee that goes one hundred percent to the fund. This party was a dance party with a DJ on the City Terrace of Long Center and a jazz band in Kodosky lounge. There was food and drink and a silent auction but, mostly, we were there to see people and we saw a ton of people we know and met new ones.

We spent the evening reading (well, FFP watched a football game which miraculously was delivered by our dicey building DirecTV Sat service). I went out with my god dog's mom for the final walk. We were laughing about how she behaves when I take her out (looking longingly over her shoulder at the building where she last saw Mom). She stopped to sniff something. My friend said, "Come on, Zoey, or I'll give you to Auntie Lin." She handed the leash to me and the dog stopped in her tracks and whipped her head around to look at her mom. Hilarious. What separation anxiety. But it means I can't take her for long walks when I'm dog sitting. The further we get from the building the more she resists.

Well, I have to go play tennis and then see about my dad. It is a lovely day for tennis, still cool out there. It's hard to appreciate it, though, with other things on my mind and when I'm actually playing more hard court tennis than is probably good for my aging body. It's a good problem to have, though, as opposed to not having anyone to play with now that I don't have to work.

The other thing that has me at loose ends is a family visit. I'm not sure how long my sister and her husband are planning to stay with my dad or what they want to do while here. We have our schedule to keep, of course.

I'm not even going to mention the uneasy, floating feeling that finishing up the condo gives me. (Wait, I just did.) I know things are ephemeral but it does give me pause to invest all this time and money and then see places next door having sheetrock sledge-hammered out. I'm just saying. It adds to the floating, nothing is permanent feeling.

The Shape of Things

The picture? From inside the giant tent erected for the festivities last weekend at the Long Center out to the 'ring' and the west terrace. Interesting light and shapes.

Lives take up a shape. Mine is now an ebb and flow of stuff, calendar choices and decisions. I had to think hard about priorities the last few days. Well, family comes first of course. Then health and well-being. (This includes the exercise that keeps getting pushed aside by lower priorities! What's up with that?) Then this whole shelter thing and its financial implications. Close on that? Social fun like eating out and the arts. Then...casual tennis. I love it, I do. Then my writing. Then competitive tennis. (I sub for teams that aim to, um, win. Not that I don't try to win every point in my casual tennis. I do. But it's different, the competitive stuff. And not in a good way.)

Stuff has been flowing around the house. Some goes out, of course. To the thrift store and to people who come by to get stuff. Into recycling. Into the shredder. But some stuff has just moved (and not by itself!) to another room or been boxed up and stuck under the stairs. I need to move out of my old office. But it is stacked with stuff I'm sorting from the spare room. What's up with that? As we touch stuff and touch it again, though, we keep getting more and more brutal. Time is short. Stuff still seems to be winning.

My dad will have to have two more operations on his eye. Family duties rise up. And they are, of course, most important.

Family Dancing

[Picture is from September 2006, Design within Reach Store, Austin.] Note cool hairdo (not). And yet, no gray.

I love seeing my family. Especially my dad's sisters and my cousins from that side. Yesterday my cousin from Houston came over with his wife and two of my dad's sisters and the younger one's husband were down from Dallas. What I don't love about seeing family is wondering why my cousin (who is younger than I if only by a year or less) has gray hair. And why my aunts are older and my dad is using his walker around the house. We played a domino game called Spinners. It's mostly luck with a bit of strategy if you care to concentrate. Everyone can still follow the game and match the pips and complain about their bad draws.

But it's hard to ignore when you are with family how old everyone has become. Except me, of course.