Monday, July 14, 2003

Poem for Sunday/Monday and Zoo

From The Gardener
By Rabindranath Tagore


I try to wreath all the morning, but the flowers slip and they drop out.
You sit there watching me in secret through the corner of your prying eyes.
Ask those eyes, darkly planning mischief, whose fault it was.

I try to sing a song, but in vain.
A hidden smile trembles on your lips; ask of it the reason of my failure.
Let your smiling lips say on oath
how my voice lost itself in silence like a drunken bee in the lotus

It is evening, and the time for the flowers to close their petals.
Give me leave to sit by your side,
and bid my lips to do the work that can be done in silence
and in the dim light of stars.

--------

Sunday morning we went over to Aunt Jean and Uncle Bob's house for brunch, along with Paul's parents, Jon, Brooke and the babies, and cousin Craig and his wife Lisa. Jean made French toast casserole and some kind of quiche as well as apple-chicken sausage and other goodies. We sat around eating and chatting while the kids played Legos down the basement. I rocked Holden to sleep, and when he woke up on my shoulder he promptly threw up all over me -- I tried not to take it personally.

In the afternoon we went to the Woodland Park Zoo, where I met the lovely ChrisMM whom I had previously known only online. We chatted about fandom, life in Seattle and stuff around listening to my kids make excited pronouncements about things the animals were doing. It's a small but very nicely laid-out zoo where we saw a baby gorilla, a houseful of bats and other nocturnal animals, elephants in a replica of a Thai village, an aviary, a bug collection, and lots of snakes, which made my boys very happy.

From there we drove to Paul's parents' trailer at Lake Pleasant campground on a lake near Bothell, where we had hot dogs and s'mores on the grill and watched ducks waddle to the water. It was another beautiful, clear, cool evening and though the boys had been invited to sleep at the campground, they opted to return to the hotel so that they could swim in the indoor pool one more time and eat a big buffet breakfast the next morning. So after a trip to the grocery store to pick up provisions for camping in Idaho and Wyoming, we went back to swim.

Tomorrow night we will be camping in Idaho so I'm not sure when I will be online next; I might check mail in the morning, but will definitely have no computer access between noon tomorrow and late Tuesday evening when we will be in Montana briefly en route to Devil's Tower, my favorite place in the U.S. So have a good Monday!


Gorillas through glass

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