There are times when children are right and parents are wrong. We’re so often trained to think that children know nothing when they actually know quite a lot when it comes to their thoughts and feelings. It’s just too easy for parents to overrule their children just because they “say so” and because they’re older and taller and heavier than the kids below them. Sometimes parents need to obey their children.
With age comes experiential wisdom and, we hope, a certain jading when it comes to living a right life. Where once we surprised, now we are prepared; where once we were astonished, now we are bemused.
“It goes on…” is likely the best takeaway motto the elders among us have vested in the current lifetime. Life is circular and repetitive and expectation grows dark and deep as uncertainty continually erupts to corrupt the circle.
We yearn to be virtuous against our impending and inevitable ending, and in that shadow between first bursting and the final shovel is the test of our lives. Have we behaved ethically? Were we in this world just for ourselves? Did we, in some way, serve the others among us without an expectation of a return on our investment?
Continue reading → Between Virtue and Mortality: Of This Shadow We Have Known
We spend our lives creating, and waiting in, queues. We do our best to manage the dead time in line and when we are responsible for the movement of any queue, we oftentimes become impatient with a process that more slowly unravels than the speed in which it tightened.
Sometimes there’s nothing to be done except to stand back and let the queue take on a life of its own and allow it to expire when the momentum of the movement is exhausted.
There are three kinds of basic queues that capture our daily lives: Physical, Virtual and Ethereal. Let’s examine them in kind.
Continue reading → On Unraveling the World and Letting the Queue Clear
Portugal, and the world of football (soccer), is in mourning today after the death of one of its favorite sons — “The King” of Portuguese football Eusébio — has died from a heart attack aged 71.
The funeral is tomorrow.
Three days of National mourning have been declared by the president.
Continue reading → Eusébio Morreu: R.I.P. Eusébio da Silva Ferreira
by Nancy McDaniel
Not my mother
Nor my stepmother
Nor even an official godmother
But my “almost mom”
Who has loved me for over 60 years
I’m an “almost sister” to her two sons
For those same 60 years.
Maybe better than a “real” mom
Because we are first of all friends
I can talk to her more honestly and openly
Than I could to any of my “other” moms
Laughing over silly mistakes
That we each make
Or things we both forget
Helping each other with projects
Reminiscing about old recipes, old parties
And funny stories from 50 years ago:
Autumn is the time of harvest, and there is nothing more potent than apples as a sign of the move towards winter — especially in Europe. Tomatoes and pumpkins and squash are considered summer fruits which might overlap into autumn — but the apple harvest signifies that autumn is here and winter is approaching.
Thanks to my over zealous neighbors, I have had nigh on a hundred buckets of apples to deal with over the past few months.
First were these red — almost purple beauties. We have been unable to find what exact variety these are. We do know that they are classified as “Heirloom Portuguese” and that the trees they came from are over 50 years old.
Growing up in the Midwest, there was a yearly visit to the State Fair that — during my childhood, at least — was always tempered with a tremendous terror.
For many months, there was a story in the newspaper about a young boy who visited the Nebraska State Fair in Lincoln and then disappeared. He was continuously searched for on the Fairgrounds and communities in the area would get together and search other pockets of the city so the boy might be found.
A long while later, the boy’s decomposing body was discovered stuffed inside an empty train tank car in a faraway town. The thinking at the time was that the boy had run into a carnival worker — a Carny — and something horrible happened and the boy was killed and stuffed, and sealed, into the tank out of convenience since the railroad ran straight through the Fairgrounds.
Continue reading → The Modern Fairway Carny: Itinerant Street Vendors
As we creep closer to sliding into our graves, we cannot help but look back over the arc of our lives and be tempted to wonder what is and what might have been. There’s no regret in the ongoing evaluation of who we are and what we intended to become.
I always found it odd, and a little off-putting, growing up as a child in the Midwest, and having the older folks around me scan the obituaries page in the daily newspaper.
Looking for deaths — sometimes with both hope and regret — was maudlin and a little frightening to me, but the obit page was the final period on the end of a single image forged in sweat and hope against an impending darkness. You were okay to be forgotten as long as the descriptive bits of you found final ink on a page.
Now that I live in the New York City area, and moved by both time and tide, I cannot help but be driven by my Midwestern DNA to scan the obituaries page of the New York Times. It’s a wildly different experience reading the East Coast death roll call because these were the famous, and the infamous, and we are expected to remember them longer than the same sort of dead friends reported from the farmlands and valleys of the regular clarion — but we won’t.
Continue reading → Remembering Over Reinventing: Obituaries and the Unnamed
Vienna was for us a huge delightful surprise. A well-preserved, clean city with ample, clean, reliable public transport that was reasonably affordable.
Vienna was more expensive than we anticipated but not as expensive as other capital cities such as London or Paris — however I feel that we got what we paid for.
If you are a museum buff there are ticket schemes that allow you to pay in advance and get some discounts on most entry tickets. These would be well worth paying for as almost all of the major attractions charge for entry = allow 15/20 euros a head for adults — more if you want a guided tour.
Eating out is also expensive in comparison with Lisbon and the rest of Portugal and we found it hard to find authentic Austrian Cuisine — allow at least 50 Euros a head per meal — not including wine or dessert.
There is no such thing as a quick coffee — however their coffee confections and alternatives like herbal iced tea are to die for. These two at The Medusa left no change from 12 euros.
Mr P has iced cappuccino, I have iced lychee and lavender tea — both were amazing and were the height of our culinary experiences here.
I love discovering new interoperative cultural memes, and I happened upon one over the weekend at the local McDonald’s. I’m not a big fan of McDonald’s, but they do try to offer some healthy food, and I appreciate they set a major agenda when it comes to creating an entire landscape of community dietary choices. There is grand power in creating caloric counts. Oftentimes, the only affordable meal in an urban neighborhood is found under the Golden Arches — and that creates a static economy and a trapped customer base. We’ll discuss more about that dangerous, if unassailable, economic power tomorrow.
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