Oaks and Sugar

We visited a plantation on the Mississippi today. Took us an hour to get there, where we saw the beautiful 28 oak lane leading up to the antebellum mansion. I've been there before, back in 1993, and our tour of the mansion was cut short then because they were filming Interview With A Vampire there. This time we were able to see the whole house, which was very beautiful.

It was cold and rainy today, and walking around the grounds of the plantation made me feel a little depressed. When I came to the plaque commemorating the slaves who worked on the plantation, I had to stop and think. After a while I started walking away, feeling even more depressed. But then I stopped, as an amazing thought struck me. Has anyone at this plantation bothered to tell the ghosts of the slaves the news? I looked back at the site where the slave houses had once been and whispered "Guess what! A black man is about to become President of the United States!" I smiled and walked away, feeling much better.

There Is A Bird In The Terminal

I keep trying to come up with some kind of metaphor for the bird I see flitting about by my gate. I'm sitting here, waiting for my plane after an hour delay, two terminal and three gate changes. I'm exhausted and still unsure about the benefits of this trip. Yet my predicament is nothing next to the one this tiny little brown sparrow is in. There is nowhere for him to go, and he's surrounded by fast moving giants, loud noises, vehicles buzzing around and not a bush or tree in sight. All I want to do is help him, but how? What can I do? I know there are metaphors here, but my tired brain can't pick them out. Help.

Why?

I just finished reading an article in the NY Times about what's going on in Zimbabwe, and I can't help wondering why we aren't doing anything about it. By "we" mean America. How is it that the Bush administration justifies invading Iraq on suspicion (meaning Not Verified, Not CONCRETE evidence) of weapons of mass destruction, and we can't be bothered to do anything about Mugabe? The man has torn down to the ground a proud, successful, wealthy country, replacing it with a country with one of the worst economies in the world, and a rapidly mounting death rate of the cholera epidemic, because of a collapse of basic services. Even when members of Mugabe's insane military (insane because they still support him) riot because they have no money to feed their families and aid workers taking on the daunting task of cleaning up the cities' water supply to contain the cholera epidemic mysteriously go missing...still nobody does anything to step in.

After the botched elections earlier this year, I really thought the international community would step in to stop that power-hungry madman. I guess I was wrong. And I shouldn't be surprised, considering the present state of Somalia, the Congo and the unforgivable genocide in Darfur. I can't help but wonder, if the people in Darfur were Jews or Whites, would the rest of the world have stood idly by and let millions of people be slaughtered?

Christmas is rapidly approaching, which normally is a season of hope and family and gifts any togetherness, but what about the 60,000 dead in Zimbabwe? What about their families and all those who are at risk of dying an excrutiatingly painful death from cholera? Where is their Christmas miracle? Why can't we do something to help them? Our economy may be tanking and people are losing jobs and homes left and right, but it is nothing compared to living under the control of a government that could give a rat's ass where or not you live or die. Just as long as people like Mugabe stay in power. Right. He's nothing but a terrorist in President's clothes and yet we allow him to continue killing off his people.

If anyone needs prayer this Christmas season, it's the people who are being oppressed and murdered by corrupt governments. It's especially the people who are suffering through the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe. Pray for them.

Hidden Memories

When I was a kid, there were a number of movies that I watched so many times they became a part of the fabric of my imagination. Last night I turned on the tv just in time to catch the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas. That reminded me of another movie, Bon Voyage Charlie Brown, that I had on a tape. The tape had been a recording from tv, including commercials from the late 80s, and at the end of the Charlie Brown movie was The Flight Of Dragons.

After watching tv last night I decided to look up both films on YouTube, and sure enough they were there. I went to sleep after having watched the begining of Bon Voyage. The music, the sounds, the scenes were so deeply ingrained in my mind that I could remember what it was like to watch them when I was a kid. I could even remember the commercials scattered throughout the tape. Especially that Jiff peanut butter ad where this mom is talking about it and drawing a perfect heart with her knife in the smooth new surface in the jar. For years I did that to new jars of peanut butter.

What memories do you have associated to something you watched or did as a kid? Are you able to remember those vague feelings from when you were young? It's hard to describe...

Well, back to my old movies. Cheers!

21 Years

I'm writing this post from my brand new iPhone, my birthday gift. Now that my 27th birthday has come and gone, however, I must take note of a much more important gift. 21 years ago, my mother and her boyfriend walked into a mall in Nice, France, and they stopped in a shop that sold toys. After looking over the wide selection of stuffed animals, they settled on a small black panther with bright green eyes. They delivered him to an extatic 6 year old, who named him Moonlight, because his eyes seemed to glow in the light of the moon at night.

21 years later, he still has some of his original silky hair under his legs and in his ears, but the rest of him bears the marks of 21 years of love. He only has two wiskers left, and there are a couple of little bare spots here and there, but he is in great shape and his eyes still glow in the light of the moon. He's been to every country, every state, every place I've ever been, even out to sea.

I'm sure people think I'm nuts for the devotion I show this little kitty, considering that he's a stuffed animal, but I've never thought of him as anything less than real, anything less than the best, most loving friend I have. So here is a very Happy 21st Birthday to my Moonlight.

depths

I don't know why I think about these things, but sometimes random contemplation comes to me in random places. I was thinking about how some people are really shallow, transparent, and others are really deep. I eventually decided that people are like the ocean.

Some people are like the Keys. Some are murky from the wave action churning up the sand till you can hardly see anything and there isn't much to them. Others are clear and bright and you can see long distances underwater. They are colorful and full of life, just like the reefs you find in the Keys.

Others are like the deep ocean. Their personalities may stay near the surface, where the light filters in, or they are very dark and unfathomable as they go deeper. Where the ocean looses all light is a forbidding, pitiless place, where life must struggle to survive.

I think I'm like the part of the ocean where the continent drops away into the abyss. I can see long distances around me, and there is a lot of life and color there, on the continental shelf. There is also darkness, if only I step off the edge. But I choose to stay near the surface, loving the light and color and life that flourishes there.

Cheers!

The Things My Hands Do...

This is the final outcome of a very long running project. I was shocked when I saw it for the first time, in stone... I've been staring at it for weeks in clay on a piece of plywood.