They Are All Around Us

Warm and rainy today. A wake and a funeral for me, honoring not one but two fathers dear to many. I know I always loved to sit beside them at a party.Yesterday my thoughts were with my own single parent of a mom, born October 26th in her parents’ bed. She and this weather and the week’s two deaths have sent me to my camera here with the ivy going slowly magenta-colored outside my office window.This is my mom as a small child. She's the sad-looking one with her two brothers and her jaunty baby sister.

She is sad-looking because their mother died when she was only two and in a way she never got over it.Then, under her, is the dead young mother herself for whom my mother was named and I am named and my firstborn daughter was named in her turn. People didn't smile showing their teeth in those days but she was blithe as I know from her letters.

Then underneath this is that lady's high school diploma from the 1890s, rescued from a hundred-years' moldering in an attic carton. Diplomas really were made of sheepskin once, so restoring it wasn't all that hard. I see now that the red book beside it is “A Mass for the Dead,” and how strange is that on this day that I see a book with that name, a memoir so powerful I had to stop reading it one-third of the way through! Maybe today is the day to pick it up again after one man's funeral and another man's wake and before that man's funeral tomorrow.The dead are all around us of course, the "strengthless dead" as the poet called them only I'm not so sure they're all that faint and devoid of strength. Anyway the spirits of Gene King and John Lumsden are not faint; they have only just passed and today and in these first days following I know their families will feel them again and again and see them in their dreams.

Strange Beauty

Last night when I stepped out of the sold-out I-Max theatre for a moment, I saw that I’d received a text from a young person in my life. “Hey, I’m at Avatar,” I answered. “It’s a truly phenenomal movie. See it twice,” he texted back and I think I just might do that because when was the last time I witnessed people clapping at a the end of a movie? When was the last time I saw folks talking so animatedly as they exited? One woman saw me looking at the crowd. “Were you as moved as I was?” she asked. “I cried!"A lot of people did as I could see since, with those 3-D glasses on, you can watch people without their knowing. I was completely swept away by what I saw. The great dragon-like creatures who fly against the human invaders with their death engines reminded me of the  Siamese Fighting Fish I used to  kept just to look upon the beauty of their  bright veil-like fins. The sight of the Na'vi  people  swaying like sea anemones in their religious ceremonies made me think how we could look like to God if we ever stopped fighting long enough to entwine our arms. And the main metaphor of Sully in his chair brought real tears to my eyes - not so much for what it says about so-called 'civilized' man with his shrunken and twisted legs, helpless as a fish on dry land without his ‘wheels,’  but for the pure force of that visual, repeated every time Jake enters the capsule that translates him to Pandora. It shows how, broken and weak, a human swoons down into Death; and then there’s that vortex of light; and then he wakes, a tall strong 'angel.' Ah that it might prove true!