By Meghan O'Rourke
She was a master of childhood, very green,
very given to play, very sleepy, very grit of gray.
I, I was a shadow in a tree for no one to see,
I was a piece of ice in a tidal sweep.
When she laughed the sea made order of disorder.
I was a shadow in a tree, a stain
along the thawing bough for no one to see.
In her life, the hours pass casually.
Snow continues to pile on snow,
the dust in the corners of the old farmhouse
grows like mice in the winter.
I, I was the snow that fell too soon,
before the ground had frozen enough to catch me
and make me stick.
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Adam goes back to school in the morning -- the whole county goes back then, but Daniel's high school is entirely taken up with freshman orientation, so he doesn't have to be there till Wednesday -- meaning Monday was officially our last day of summer vacation. We went out for lunch after Adam "called" me, pretended to be his father and instructed me in faux bass voice to take the children to California Tortilla. *g* Then we stopped at the food store, because in addition to toilet paper, we were out of Cocoa Krispies. We drove by the pool on the way home and to my surprise it was open -- we'd thought it was weekends only starting today -- so the kids got to swim before working on their summer homework, book reports and long math review packets. I finished the laundry while they finished those.
Casey breathes fire during the Globe Theatre performance by Barely Balanced at the Pennsylvania RenFaire.
Cameron and Dreagn also juggled flaming torches over Casey while she swung around flaming maces.
The glassblowers work on a witch ball that has just come out of the fire.
The oven "explodes" at the Boarshead Inn in the middle of a brawl, causing people to fling themselves into the pool below.
Things are generally pretty dignified when the Ultimate Joust begins, but they never stay that way.
This year's story involves Sir Henry Lee marrying Lady Mary Hastings in secret and infuriating the Queen when Tsar Ivan wants Mary for his own. Ultimately Ivan demands that Mary burn at the stake, over Queen Elizabeth's objections!
Ivan's wicked, wicked knights unseat the English in the joust, but Henry rides in to rescue his love from the dreadful Muscovites. (Actually, according to the program, it's Sir Lukas most weekends, but Sir Lukas wasn't riding last Sunday.)
Naturally, the pyre gets lit anyway, so the Faire can have a giant bonfire before it concludes.
After dinner we watched No Reservations, which I didn't expect to interest the kids in the least -- it's also the last night of weekday video games for a long time -- but they both watched it. I've heard it's not nearly as good as the German film it's based on, but I enjoyed it anyway, though the resemblances to Ratatouille amused me, Catherine Zeta-Jones only spoke with a US accent about 2/3 of the time, and the family dynamics were a bit too Disney-perfect. The movie made me very hungry, which usually means a food movie did something right. *g* Then the kids went to bed -- school night hours -- and Paul and I watched Into the Unknown With Josh Bernstein on Discovery, in which they investigated whether there was a historical event upon which the story of Noah's Ark might have been based (conclusion: there's not much evidence for an ark with all the beasts of the world, but some evidence for the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh where it was only the beasts of the field rescued from the flood).
I only watched the highlights of the Democratic convention, even Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama; there's only so much political blather I can take. That said, I don't know which pisses me off more: the fact that John McCain thinks women might be such idiots that we'd vote for him just because Obama rather than Clinton got the Democratic nomination, or that there seem to be women who are such idiots. The McCain campaign has found several to quote, and I uncharitably assume that they are bigoted and ignorant as well as just plain dumb. I also want to smack all the net-neutrality people who are now saying they won't vote for Obama because Biden voted in support of the telecom companies for protection on surveillance and against file sharing, though that's surely a much smaller number. Do they think John "No Civil Liberties" McCain will be friendly to their interests? I hate having to live in a country with leaders elected by tantrum-throwing brats!
Ah well, I see CERN is reenacting Angels and Demons and People is trying to queer Obama/Biden...there is entertainment in the news.
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