When they were all brave and good

I'm watching a live streaming inauguration ceremony for the incoming president of my University, Eric Kaler.  The faculty in all their robes and silly hats have just processed in to the stirring notes of a student orchestra.  Faces are appropriately solemn as the colorfully-robed assembly of dignified academics stand wait for the national anthem.  Three uniformed ROTC students carried in the flags - the nation, state, and University. 

It just occurs to me, seeing these academic faces, both of people I know and many I don't, that there's a point to this pomp and formality.  It can be a catalyst for endeavors beyond the call of duty - to service to what these individuals find to be their personal lodestone, conecting them back to the core of why they have entered into these careers, what they deeply care about.  And channeling that sort of engagement and commitment is like creating a laser beam.

We do so much need something to believe in and care about, something to bring us together for the common good, something to help ease us past our petty daily preoccupations.

May this day, and all of our institutional ceremonies (in this, our national civil religion), help bring out what is brave and good in us.

Changing season - changing household

My youngest progeny, age 23, is back home, having graduated from college (in the spring) and then filled out the year-long lease without finding a job and new place to live.  It's OK, though challenging for all of us.  We're trying to make the upstairs into actual living space after having it turn into a large and jam-packed storage area (like the basement is . . . and much of the rest of the house too, unfortunately).

I'm thinking - if not working for someone else, the kid can work for us to earn spending money - and has been doing so, yard work for the last couple of days.  After that - some household dreck purging?  Helping us part with some of the thousands of books / videotapes / magazines?

The hardest part of the transition is working to adjust pronouns, as the former young man moves through the steps to become a young woman.  Can't say "he" anymore, but "she" doesn't come trippingly to the tongue either.

I don't know how to talk about it, really.  Gender transition hasn't become as common as same-sex preference.  My mom lamented, when told about the situation, that it would have been so much easier to handle the kid's coming out as gay - we've got cousins, friends, etc., who have done that, and it's a known quantity.

Will love and trust and a good sense of humor pull us all through this?

In a fairly small house with only one bathroom?

July 30

In the afternoon, going home,

Text from my son:

My old friend's death - too late now

For that talk over old times

My dear, sweet troubadour of the city

July 29

Yes, the river view is lovely

Evening light glows blue

Above river's edge, city profile --

But what am I doing here

In the office?

Another Fantasy/SF Con

I went to the library on Thursday to pick up a collection of short stories by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, having gotten reintroduced to their work at the 4th Street Convention last month, and picked up a flier for yet another small local Sf/Fantasy con, also held in a small local hotel (Diversicon). The draw for me was two-fold: the presence of an acquaintance from years past, a local poet who has apparently been writing (in part) for SF publications, and the presence of Joan Slonczewski, a long-time favorite SF writer, who has at long last a new book coming out.

Joan is a feminist, Quaker biology professor at, I believe, Kenyon College, who has published several SF books involving ethical dilemmas humanity will face with scientific advances in genetics, among other things.

The new novel is being marketed for the Young Adult market, which is fine with me, posits an orbiting college. Packed with ideas.

More later.

Back in Lovely Idaho

We're just about at the end of a visit to my family in southern Idaho.  As always, the time has flashed by.  My sense of myself - the young person who left the state in 1969, the person now bewilderingly graying with young adult children - keeps fluctuating back and forth.  While I'm here, too, time seems to operate in different ways, speeding and slowing elastically.

The weather has been hot and clear.  The mountains assert themselves as fixtures in my psyche, revealed again as bedrock.  Leaving again (early tomorrow morning) seems unbelievable - how can it be that I've lived for decades and aged somewhere else, somewhere rather flat and moist?

The street where I spent my first six years.

Layout tweaks - need more gladness, here. . .

I've tweaked my font sizes - it occurred to me I was having trouble reading my own blog without coming up a bit close to the screen.  It took a while, though.  Hope it's helpful.

Dinking around on the set-up - I never noticed the "stats" tab before.  Just as soon I didn't know about it - too tempting to see if anyone's reading.  Which is NOT the point of writing.

The weather was a touch crisp today - the hot, muggy, deep-in-the-heart-of-summer feeling of last week vanished with the flow of Canadian air. 

I continue to post on my daily "small stones" blog (http://daystone.blogspot.com/).  That's been a fun challenge - I have to ask myself, did I notice anything in particular during the day?  Or - what was there that was worth noticing, that perhaps I missed?  Because otherwise it's easy to slide through a day so busy or distracted or generally low-spirited that nothing has much sparkle.  And that's not really being alive, is it?

Being alive is all these youngsters are about (from this morning - and also on my "small stones" blog):

How to recapture that openness, that gladness? 

More library book reading

I finished Jo Walton's Farthing and immediately located the next in the series (Ha'Penny) across town in a St. Paul library and read it in one day.  It's difficult to explain how haunting these books are - these days when politicians use hatred as a tool to gain power.  It's been done before, by experts.

Now - to find the third book.

I'm doing my daily small stones thing

You're welcome to take a peek at my daily "small stones" (and photos) of July days.

http://daystone.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, it is sure hard to keep up the energy at work.  The long weekend (even longer, as I had Tuesday off) was delicious - I read numbers of library books. 

Discovery: Jo Walton - impossible to describe how smart and imaginative this woman's writing is.  I've just started Farthing - a typical murder mystery in a gracious English manor in the 1950s, but . . . over in Europe, Hitler won.  So everything is different, but subtly so.

4th Street Fantasy Conversation

I spent the day at the 4th Street Fantasy Conversation. I've never attended a fantasy or sci fi conference, and this one is pretty unique - very small, largely attended by writers, a mix of well-known, beginning, and unknown writers. The panels are made up of some very well-known folks, some I am extremely fond of. But it's conducted as a conversation, and for many of them, it seems, an almost unbroken conversation that has been going on for years.

It raises the question again for me about why I didn't go down that path - other than falling into a career and having bills to pay, of course. Starting at 60 seems unlikely. But there's nothing at all keeping me from becoming really informed about some of the best new emerging writing.

Some sad news I discovered was that one of my most favorite authors of fantasy and YA fantasy, Diana Wynn Jones, passed away recently. I was pleased to see how revered her work is by these writers I respect.

I spent some time during what were sometimes disorganized sessions doing some Web cruising to see if any of my other all-time favorite authors were publishing and was pleased to note that R. A. Macavoy, who hadn't published for years (except a little downloadable fragment from Amazon) has a new-ish novella out - it sounds like an expanded version of what I downloaded some years back.

A couple of other writers who were important for me weren't mentioned at the 4th Street Conversation: Pat Cadigan and Joan Slonjewski. I'll need to follow up with folks in the group later on about them - if there is some follow-up conversation.

All in all - I had something approaching a mini-vacation!  Now it's back to work.