Our cousin's military funeral

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He signed up for the Marines when he graduated high school in 1973.

He served a few years. No one in the family knows what he did, he couldn't talk about it. He was a Marine on undisclosed missions in the Pacific.

Now, just before his 54th birthday, Don's cousin is gone, from congestive heart failure. What secrets were better left unsaid, that didn't take him to his grave, but he took them there?

Good night, David. Time to rest.

This was my first military funeral, though I've seen them on TV and in movies.

I was feeling sheepish about my camera until one of David's sisters met me going inside with "Thank you, none of us thought to bring one. I want the kids to have something to remember this by." From that point on, I felt complete freedom, with a purpose. If you know me, you know my protests against militarism. But it was time to set that aside and do something for the family.

Arriving at the cemetery we were greeted by a row of seven Marines holding rifles by their sides, poised in readiness for the 21-gun salute to come. I snapped several shots of their fixed faces before I went inside the mausoleum for the ceremony. Like the guards at Buckingham Palace, they were stoic and unmoving, barely breathing it seemed, in their stillness.

Inside, as the other three Marines fulfilled their ceremonial charge - one playing "Taps" on his horn outside the door, the other two marching up the aisle, then folding the flag in meditative precision - I felt calmed. When the rifles rang their 21 shots outside - each Marine firing three times in sync - and David's daughter burst into a sudden wail, I realized this is why we offer ceremony, why we turn to it in times of great sorrow and joy. In the silent, slow folding of the flag, how carefully they caressed it with their white gloves, how tightly they held it between them in their task of transformation. And I saw, as if for the first time, how beautiful our flag is. In those moments I didn't see borders, or patriotism, or war. I saw stunning, vivid colors in a bold design unlike any other flag in the world, and it had become a blanket covering a soldier at rest. A thing of comfort. And when the Marine handed David's widow the red white & blue fabric triangle I felt its power. Ah - the American flag, an instrument of healing!

I remember how I felt at age 7, perched on the floor in front of our black and white TV, watching Caroline Kennedy - one year younger than I - holding the hand of her mother dressed in black, in a veil. They walked up and touched her daddy's flag-covered casket in the vast Capitol rotunda - first her mother's black-gloved hand, followed quickly by her own small white-gloved hand - this girl with hair and white anklet socks like mine. Then her mother's kiss on the flag. They were us. We were being healed by ceremony.

If you're interested, you can view David's military honors in this YouTube slideshow.

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the color intensifies

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In the dense green of August 2003 we fell in love with the farm in one moment. We pulled into the drive for the realtor's open house after nearly giving up finding it, and stopped, speechless. The property enveloped us with itself and asked kindly to let it take care of us.

Then, after weeks completing the sales of our old house and the new one, in November we moved. Since that first August visit, autumn winds had blown maple leaves against the house in thick piles. The ground was hard and the grass gone dormant. Simple lines of land, barn and outbuildings, and bare trees that had billowed with green when we first met them, presented an altered scene.

Was I wistful for the lush green of first love? No, I was glad for the change.

Something had already shifted in me. We had wanted more of Nature, close up, which was why we were moving to the country. At the same time I was going inside too, the way you do in winter. With the light opening to me through the quiet winter landscape, looking back at it through the window was just the thing for contemplation, letting it in slowly, as if suspended. It felt like a relief to get to know the farm in its unadorned state.

Now, each year after winter's span from Thanksgiving to Christmas and past the frozen calm of January and February, the next season comes in degrees, thankfully. Before spring shivers and erupts into full riots of color - iris tongues sprout an inch, and the birch sapling sheds its tissue skin, igniting into sunny orange flames (the color was really that saturated).

I'm ready for warmth, but am I ready for the riot? If I get outside often in these warming, lengthening days, I can slow down the transition for myself. Something I want:

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Paris: l'indispensable

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We're coming onto April and the inevitable spring light that slants through trees at a particular height, angle and shade of amber, lasting just a couple of weeks. When it happens, I'm in Paris.

Above, Don is standing in the clock window of the Orsay museum in 2003. He snapped me, below, the afternoon we rode bikes for hours in the Bois de Boulogne and still didn't see a fraction of it. That's not a surprise when you realize it is two and a half times the size of New York's Central Park. (Believe me, I was very happy, even though I don't seem to be smiling in this photo.)

If you're like me and you want to fly to Paris, but can't at the moment, find a Paris blog, like Peter's wonderful one - full of history, architecture and art, or mine, where I posted just 35 posts mostly in 2006. My blog has been waiting for another visit by its proprietor, but lucky Peter gets to live there.

In 2006, this was the view from my apartment window

in Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine;

I could hear laughter and conversation rising up from the street

through my open window for hours

while I tried to sleep. Ask me if I minded one bit.

I also watched and listened to a storm come in,

which for me is heaven.

Carousel in the Place de Varsovie, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower; I watched these two men talk while they watched girls walk by.

It was May when the horse chestnuts were in season - beautiful to look at,

but one evening walking the Seine the wind was throwing

chestnut pollen into everyone's eyes. Mine were watering

so I could hardly see, and I began to notice that everyone else

walking was wiping their eyes too.

Most parks in Paris don't make you "stay off the grass" and are full of people at lunch time, well all day really.

The Fauchon food store is a treat for the eyes as well as the stomach. I snapped this outside Fauchon's window, looking in. The reflection creates a puzzle - which is out, which is in?

I think it's best to stay in an apartment, which is more economical than a hotel,

partly because each day you can eat a meal or two at home.

My favorite meal at home:

roquefort bleu cheese, baguette and French beans (haricots verts).

Plus a bottle of red.

Oh dear, I'm working myself up to not being happy with just photos. Either that or I will just keeping posting more and more of them. Pretty soon I'll be in a Paris frénésie!

I wanted to start a business helping folks plan focused, personalized tours of the city, which was part of the point of my 2006 solo trip. I was also celebrating my 50th birthday, thanks to generous family, but no one had time to get away with me! After my loved ones ganged up on me with this idea, first I felt guilty, then I got giddy and decided it would be brilliant to have the week alone and do just what I pleased at any given moment. But by the second day, I longed to talk with Don, my kids, my brothers and sisters, or a friend, about the day. Thankfully I had my laptop and was able to do just that in the evening on google chat. Now, I think ideal travel is with someone, but getting off on your own for at least a few hours here and there to wander down a street or into a shop that beckons you, or to eat Coq au Vin that nobody else cares about.

One idea for focused touring was to explore the haunts of literary American expats Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitgerald, et. al. Another would be to photograph different daily themes: Day 1 - lampposts; Day 2 - clocks; Day 3 - bridges; etc. Like writing a research paper, when you're focused on one thing, you learn about a lot of other things while gaining deeper understanding of the one thing you're researching. I started the Paris Deconstructed blog as a way into that business plan. But I let it fizzle. Maybe I'll have a chance to pursue it one day, and walk the Seine again.

After working on this post, Thursday I left a new post at Paris Deconstructed after more than two years. So it is officially out of hiatus. I plan to post something there about once a week, as long as two trips worth of film images hold out, or until my next visit, whichever comes first.

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flaxination

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After months of bundling up, it's comforting to look ahead to summer when I'll be skipping to the laundry line in loose linen clothes. I know, I know, I've been posting lots of winter praise, but I confess my shoulders ache with tension from bracing for the outdoors. This is my Filene's Basement $7 linen skirt, which I wore hanging laundry last summer for Peter to shoot a laundry line series on my first Holga film roll.

The linen for those summer clothes is made from flax of course. I didn't realize what a labor intensive process flax-to-linen is until I read about pulling, stacking, swingling, rippling, retting, scutching, heckling, spinning and weaving here. It's done mostly by machine now, but you can see Egyptians in these images growing and processing flax for linen. Do you suppose they ironed their linen garments? That would be an interesting frame added to these Egyptian collages.

We will be using another product made from flax when we install old fashioned linoleum squares in our bathroom. What appealed to us about linoleum (unlike vinyl) is that it is made from linseed - flax - and is natural and biodegradable.

Ingesting flax is good for you too. I take flax seed oil supplements for their high levels of lignans (chemicals that act as antioxidants) and Omega 3 fatty acids. There are wide-ranging health benefits against diabetes, heart disease, cancer and maybe Crohn's disease.

I was surprised to read about the "This Way" bike at boingboing. It's made from flax, but it looks like wood. I can just see myself riding this Big Wheel for adults on country roads to work. Nice thought actually.

I am humbled by new technologies as well as ancient processes that I know nothing about from experience. Friends like Gwen have sheered sheep and spun the fleece into wool, then knitted it into garments. She would not surprise me at all if she told me she has processed flax into linen.

Hands, hands, what are you doing? I think I live too much in my head.

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I is for Imp

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imp

-noun

1.	a little devil or demon; an evil spirit.

2.	a mischievous child.

There is a lot of folklore about imps. They take other forms too, such as gremlins, goblins and gnomes (what's with the "G"s?), and Pan and Puck, oh and Dobby the house elf.

I was told recently by my sister that my life path number (15) indicates the need to let loose and be more of an imp. If your older sister (eleven years older) tells you something like that, doesn't that impart a mandate? This was especially intriguing as it came just after I'd added that little girl to my sidebar. I thought, hmm, not only am I shrinking back to childhood, maybe this is a call back to a childhood I never lived, that of the mischievous child.

So, picture the image at the top, and those aren't sheep, but chickens.

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Don, suddenly looking up from his Hobby Farms magazine, over his reading glasses: "What the . . .?! How'd the chickens get out!!?"

Ruth: "Wha?"

Don, now at the window, confused: "Look! I didn't let them out!"

Ruth, turning to look through the window at the hens frolicking with Khan, then back to Henry James to re-read the same sentence for the fifteenth time: "Wow, that's weird."

Don: "Did you let them out?" he asks incredulously. Suddenly he reviews the mental calendar in his head wondering if it's April Fool's Day yet.

Ruth: "Moo heee?" (pulling a phrase her impish mother used to say for "Who me?")

Don, scratching his head: "Maybe I didn't latch the coop tight last night." And he throws on his jacket, steps into his farm clogs and lets the door bang behind him.

Ruth peeks out the window at him, trying to enjoy watching him make a beeline for the coop door. But she's afraid. What if one of the hens got gobbled by a hawk in the last 15 minutes since she snuck out and opened the latch? That would be a bad life path number 15.

Don returns. "I must be losing my mind. And I'll never get them back in until dusk. Oh well, hope they enjoy the day out."

Ruth: "So they're all accounted for?"

Don: "No, they're scavenging now, so I won't be able to count until they're back in the roost this evening."

Oh dear, Ruth will have to suffer as an imp all day Sunday. And oh no! Last night was daylight savings, prolonging the misery an extra hour!

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Technology overload vs. the world in a cup

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I've been trying to read books and printed articles as a balance to online surfing. The nagging voice to "read more books" (sometimes through friends in kind and subtle ways) is finally taking hold. The excuse that my eyes are too sleepy at the end of the day is getting ignored as long as it's before 8:30.

So it was great to find an interview with Nicholas Carr (author of Does IT Matter?) in The Sun (see Carr's blog and home page too), titled "Computing the Cost." It's about how the Internet is rewiring our brains. (The entire March 2009 issue of The Sun is about technology and its effects on us.) By the way, I read the print version.

Apparently we use different parts of our brains for reading a book or other print materials than for reading online. Carr refers to the book iBrain, by Gary Small who studied two dozen people, half of whom had little Internet experience, and half of whom had a lot. Dr. Small and his colleague scanned their brains while they searched the Internet, resulting in different patterns of brain activity. The subjects with little Internet experience showed activity in language, memory and visual centers, typical of someone reading. The experienced Internet users had more activity in the decision-making areas of the brain. Disturbingly, within a few days of surfing, the previously non-users' brain activity resembled that of the frequent users. I haven't read Small's book, but Carr questions whether we are losing a vital part of our brain function that thinks and synthesizes information.

While reading the interview, first off, I felt pretty good about myself for trudging through The Ambassadors week after week, because I have felt, decisively, that on p. 144 I am more easily grasping content than I did at p. 1 or 10 or even 80. It doesn't really bother me that it's taking so long to get through James' novel, because I'm getting through it. And I am finding it possible to sit for longer periods reading it too. Thirty minutes is longer than 15. And 60 is longer than 30. That's about what I'm up to, 30-60.

Second, I recognized that when it comes to information, more is not necessarily better. While access to oceans of information is great on one hand, on the other, a) it is overwhelming and b), as Carr says, we are becoming big flat pancakes with lots and lots of facts in our heads and at our fingertips, but losing deeper thinking skills. If I read a political story, then read four blogs about it, did I give myself a chance to reflect on the event? And what influence will government or other agencies use to control me one day, if I am too reliant on this medium?

Clearly, the Internet's value to become more informed about current affairs, geography, history, literature, the environment, ways to help and not least, meeting friends around the world, is vast. And by limiting information intake I don't mean I want to close my eyes to the world's problems.

I'd like to contain the world in a cup, which of course isn't possible. But I don't mind keeping my world smaller than the Internet and its Googles and Wikis want to pull me into. I think a deeper, more focused world is a richer one.

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stardust memory

Composite image taken from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope

- found at National Geographic's space photo galleries

My stardust moment was in 1976 at 7,000 feet in the Cascade Mountains, not far from Ashland, Oregon (on the west coast of the U.S.). It was 11:00pm on one of my first nights of a fall semester studying there. The air was crisp and clear but not cold when I stepped out of the library onto the porch. Light falling on my shoulders through the library windows was the only light visible to me in the black night. I left the lit porch and crossed the two-lane mountain logging road and continued on the dirt drive home, lost in thought and darkness, face down, walled by Ponderosa pines almost invisibly black, when something caught my upper peripheral vision, stopping me in my tracks. No, not a moose. I was utterly Alone.

It was the sky. Stardust. Not a single patch of sky undotted with a star. But more than that, some dots were so densely clustered they melded solidly into Milky rivers and lakes of stars. It was a revelation to a small town 20-year-old who had only ever seen the dot-to-dot of major constellations like the Big and Little Dippers and Orion's Belt. Though I was sky-challenged and didn't have a clue what I saw, I was staring at the spiral arms of the Milky Way branching out from the center's Sagittarius. Life was different after that. There was a shift from knowing everything, to imagining what there was I hadn't yet seen.

Besides the 1980 Woody Allen film "Stardust Memories" - some say his best, and the 2007 fantasy movie "Stardust," there is also the song "Stardust" recorded in 1933 by Louis Armstrong (a jazz standard, it was also recorded by Sinatra and Nat King Cole).

Below is Louis Armstrong's recording of "Stardust." You'll hear him repeat the line "O memory" three times at the end, giving us the phrase "Stardust Memories." I never knew that three "memories" sung by Satchmo are the origin of this familiar phrase. Plug in your good speakers for this one, it's worth it.

Stardust

And now the purple dusk of twilight time

Steals across the meadows of my heart

High up in the sky the little stars climb

Always reminding me that we're apart

You wander down the lane and far away

Leaving me a song that will not die

Love is now the stardust of yesterday

The music of the years gone by

Sometimes I wonder why I spend

The lonely night dreaming of a song

The melody haunts my reverie

And I am once again with you

When our love was new

And each kiss an inspiration

But that was long ago

Now my consolation

Is in the stardust of a song

Beside a garden wall

When stars are bright

You are in my arms

The nightingale tells his fairy tale

A paradise where roses bloom

Though I dream in vain

In my heart it will remain

My stardust melody

The memory of love's refrain

[oh memory . . . oh memory . . . oh memory]

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