Leaving Planet Desmond: Part Three Re-entry

Kahlil Gibran moved me when he said, "You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."


I'll never leave Planet Desmond, no matter how far as arrows he and his mommy shoot off into the future.  Because, yes, (get ready for the sticky sweet mixed metaphors and likenings) I don't actually live on Planet Desmond. I thought I had been swept up into that crazy, whirling, wonderfully wondrous world that sprang into existence the moment Little Big Bang exploded my world, from the inside out, as it happens.  He landed in me rather than my landing on the planet him.  By the way, his mother did the same thing to me on another plane in a different season. I rejoice at this.


I guess what I'm really trying to say is that even though I wish we could live together in the same little dust-devil for many more years to come, I am truly, sincerely, reverently and unfalteringly happy about letting them THWHITTT through the air. (That's the closest I could come to onomatopoeia for an arrow being sprung from the bow.)


It's the right and natural thing and deep down I find it vicariously adventurous.  So no more lamenting the loss of quirky play and perplexing pronouncements, the little, almost imperceptible lurking in my doorway of a midnight, the lashy over-the-shoulder looks that thinly cloak some inner fantastic imaginings, the new wonder at an old ritual, the helpful unloading and unfolding of clothes in the laundry basket, purple play dough, green security suitcase bubble-popping, pink lunches and games of chase where the object is to run squealing into the chaser's arms and get caught. 


I can't write three years of living with Little Big Bang and it's not a productive exercise to embarrass language against the pith and soul-poetry of the Desmond that is our Desmond.  So it's done.  (Well, the public lamenting is over, but I'm allowing myself the lovely inner longing for a little longer.)

 This picture was taken on their last day of play at Boston Harbor Marina.  Such a fitting farewell.

Leaving Planet Desmond: Somewhere In The Middle

The kids have been gone for several days already.  I've finished up a week at work and have begun another one.  I've been pretending that there are things enough to keep me busy and happily engaged, but it's a hard job, that pretense. 
I have to say that I am genuinely happy and anticipating a future full of promise, joy and wonder for my little gone family.  Go get 'em, you guys!
But damn!  No more of this in my home right now:

Well, you get the idea.

Leaving Planet Desmond: The Beginning

(I still have grand hopes of continuing my other blog writing project, and will eventually get back to that.)


Of late, I have been so preoccupied with moving and fluffing up my empty-again nest, I haven't taken time to do much more than the essentials, like go to work, spend every other minute with Katy and Desmond, and more recently Katy and Desmond and Jesse...and now with none of them...you now, except via text and pictures and phone! And maybe watching an episode or two of some British fare on Netflix.  I really need distraction at the prospect of otherwise experiencing intense emotion.


I arranged a five-day break from work to pack and move and recuperate last week.  Jesse came out from Utah on Monday, and on Tuesday we all packed and then on Wednesday, we rented a moving truck to get our belongings down the hill into my new, smaller apartment in the same complex. 
"Somebody" misjudged the height of the truck against the top of the car port and ripped a healthy chunk of tin roof (not ice cream, more's the pity) right the hell off!  I reported it immediately, but the office said they got a lot of calls of other people reporting the incident, as well.  We had a good $521.00  laugh over that one.


Katy and Jesse did all the loading and maneuvering and figuring things out while I went back to work.  Sometimes I was available to play with Desmond in order to keep him from getting trampled or from trampling others, in the process.  One of his favorite toys these days is my carry-on green, wheeled suitcase.  Well, it's no longer mine, actually, now that we think about it.  He pushes it around the house and it accompanies him when he is engaged in other activities, sort the way most kids drag around teddy bears and soft blankets.  During the move, he discovered a big ol' full-sized rolling suitcase and tried to boss that thing around the house, too, but didn't protest very much when I found a secluded spot in the closet for it.


Of course, as has always been the case, much more often than I would have liked, we got moved into the shiny new apartment.  Wall to wall mats, mattresses, beds, bedding, boxes and other containers, linens and frozen foods.  When we headed home from being out and about, Desmond referred to the apartment as "bed" rather than home, because the sparse furnishings were inaccessible and life got lived mostly on mattresses place on the floor. 


Now comes the fun and dreamy part!  The out and abouting that we did for several days in a row.  The sun has just begun to grace our days after a really wet winter this year.  Bus rides, farmer's market jaunts, yoghurt and honey purchases, playgrounds in the forest, and the very best of all -- so best that we did it over and over--were trips to Boston Harbor Marina where we all reveled in individual and shared idyllic mellowing.  It's a feeling for me akin to sitting and stroking the warm sand on the beach in Santa Cruz with the boardwalk and carnival atmosphere in the distance behind me, the squall and squeal of seagulls overhead, water, water, so much water! within walking distance, little and larger sail boats rocking in the harbor, and not a single have-to-get-it-done nagging in the back of my head. 


The little market sells sea-salt caramels, Desmond's usual vanilla soft-serve-in-a cup, beverages and other snacks and sometimes people will bring in fresh catch from the sound and sell it while it's still wiggling.  It also reminds me of my family's summer get-togethers, so comfortable and pleasant with nothing and a lot going on at the same time.  You can overhear other people's conversations and not care at all about them, and know that they can hear you and not feel self-conscious about anything.  Desmond runs from and chases dogs and balls and other kids who magically show up in bright blue shirts with cheap plastic water guns. 


We leave after a few hours and I feel absolutely Graced.  We sometimes have plans to maybe go other places for a change and something happens to pull us back.  A tiny hailstorm, Desmond's plea for ice cream as if it's a brand new idea that he's had for a long time, a desire to recharge in a way that no other place has the same draw.  I don't know how to explain it.

Writing Photographs #3 Artistic Red

Katy made her own red film for this one (dogwood52 photo challenge, Artistic:Red)

My Relationship with Red

We have a lot of red hair in our Ulster Scots/German family.  Strawberry blonde, auburn, red. Growing up, it garnered not just a little antagonism from our peers...and others.  Neighbors would call out to us, "Something's burning...And I think it's you-oooo!"  We had friends who raided other's gardens and we got lumped into the blame: "I hope you and your little red-headed friends had fun eating my watermelon!"

And naturally, the requisite freckles came with the package.  I was very stoic as a youngster, believing that if I acted as though I didn't care, people would get tired of taunting me and leave me alone.  That didn't really work all the time. I never complained about having red hair and freckles, and as a matter of fact I remember my father telling me, when I was very young, that if I ate black-eyed peas, the number of freckles on my skin would proliferate.  I believed him. People also said they were angel kisses.  I wanted to believe them all, because at three and four years old, who knew freckles were going to be so much trouble down the road?  Although, my daughter knew when it came time for her to experience it.  She came home from first grade one day and said, "Someone made fun of my freckles today.  I knew this was going to come up!"

When I was a teenager, a family friend brought a magazine to me, with a picture of a very pretty young woman who had just won a Freckles Beauty Contest, and the friend said to me, "See, Penny.  Freckles can be pretty!"  The thing that got me about that was that I had never mentioned to her or very likely anyone else that I was displeased about having freckles and red hair.  I don't think I ever really was.  I just really hated the teasing.  I thought her saying that to me said more about what she thought about my red hair and freckles than what I did.

My father's nickname was "Cherry," having been given that name in the army.  It was actually more than a nickname because that's what everyone called him all the time.  Friends, neighbors and relations, all, and it didn't seem feminine to me.  Somehow, being a man named Cherry seems a little jarring today.  Like you wouldn't give your son a fruit name, (but we had a teacher who named her daughter "Peaches."  For real.)

And then my younger sister was born and our parents hadn't been able to decide upon a name, so at the last minute to have something to put on the birth certificate, she was named, "Cherrie."  She has red hair. Over the years, people would tell me they remembered my name by associating it with my copper-colored hair.  Neither my sister nor I was named a red-headed name because we had red hair. Just happy coinkidinks! I was the first-born daughter and given the name my mother had chosen from a favorite childhood story that she had carried around all her life and eventually given to me.

My kid brother had the cutest red curls.  He was born in 1976, a time when it was pretty cool for little boys to have longish hair.  He was not quite three when he asked me, "Penny, what's my hair doing?" It took me a minute to realize he was trying to remember the word, "curly." thinking that when we talked about his curly red hair, he understood that as an action. "It's curly, Michael." (You beautiful blue-eyed, red-haired little cherub!)  When he got older, his name changed as a matter of course to "Red."

Writing Photographs #2 Traditional Landscape

Katy's Traditional Landscape entry for the #dogwood52 photo challenge.

I thought it would be clever of me to write a landscape from a contrasting season to her Antelope Island, Utah winter, but sometimes I just go with obvious over clever.

When I lived in Alaska and traveled the state for business, my first winter there I made a trip to Valdez, Alaska.  This almost-300 square foot city (of which 55 square feet are water) lies at the head of a deep fjord in the Prince William Sound. Some people travel to Valdez by ferry across from Homer or Seward, but I drove.  I was already driving from Anchorage north to Glennallen and Copper Center via the Alaska Highway.  I was reaching out, introducing and delivering low vision services in surrounding village and rural locations.  In a place called Kenny Lake lived a woman who worked as an Alzheimer's care consultant, who helped guide me to places of most need.  Well, not really just most need, but any need, as we often took very long drives just to visit one person.

All of my time in Alaska was like living a dream, and traveling with this wonderfully joyful woman made me laugh til the tears rolled.  Every trip!  So, it's quite fortunate that she was my traveling companion through the heavily glaciated Chugach Mountains during the first snow of the year wherein we broke all snow records in the whole state of Alaska, had a flat just outside of town with sketchy service on our flip phones, got snowed in for an extra day and I fell on the ice getting groceries.

I thought I was walking on snow, but there was ice under there.  My feet shot forward and up, right out from under me.  I landed on my seat first, then the back of my head, which bounced me back up into a sitting postion.  My first thought was that I was surely going to have a headache and be sore in a myriad of other places tomorrow.  But, it never happened. I didn't even hurt much at all after about 10 minutes.

We had much assistance and support from the locals, who, like people in most small towns I've been in, were so friendly and not bothered by bothersome circumstances.

I was so happy to be snowed in.  That was one of the perks, actually, of my job.  In addition to traveling, I could also be at the mercy of Mother Nature who allowed me extra time to see and do things I had never experienced before.  Our hotel was right on the harbor, and this was the first time I had ever seen snowfall in a port city.  It was alluring and magical.

I think I could be happy living in Valdez.  For more than just the landscape there.

Writing Photographs #1 Myself

This is my daughter's self-portrait.  She's involved in a photography challenge, submitting a photo a week for 52 weeks.  When I saw the list of assignments, it sparked a little wistfulness in me.  One of my old dreams was to be a photographer, and I do still really enjoy taking and looking at pictures.  I find now, though, that my enjoyment comes as much from seeing the thing I took a picture of in the picture, as from appreciating the art of photography.  I've since lost interest in the task of taking really good, creative photos.  Just don't anyone take away my smartphone.

Other people do a much better job of capturing the Blood Moon, or the stark black and white eagle on a snowy branch, or the swirling green and magenta Northern Lights.  Maybe Facebook and Instagram are guilty of perpetuating a glut of photos, saturating the collective senses of the masses, and it's only really, really good or unusual ones that stand out anymore.  So, I tip my hat.  I'm not a photographer. And other people are.

I still have some creative hankering knocking around in my head, though.  That's one reason I started this blog in the first place.  I don't fancy that I'm a special snowflake of a writer, but I have found that, whether anyone else does or not, I really like to read what I've enjoyed writing.  

I have been an avid reader most of my life and when I was in college, I was inspired by certain writers.  Then one day I read a book that made me almost give up writing.  If someone could produce something this stirring, so raw and artfully written, why would I even bother to write anything at all?  It was that good, and it doesn't even matter what book it was by which author, because that experience was all about me, about how it distilled in my own mind.  I've since got over that idea.  I want to write.  I don't want to "be a writer," I just really like to use words. 

Maybe I don't pursue photography because almost anyone these days can take better pictures than I do.  But I know for sure, I'm not going to find anyone on Facebook or Instagram who can write about me and my head the way I can.  

Lately, I've not been doing that so much, but an idea came to me as I thought about this 52-photo challenge.  Maybe it will be interesting to write the assignments as my daughter snaps them.  Not describe the photos she's taking, but write something alongside.  For example, the first assignment was to do a self-portrait.  Writing a self-portrait could be interesting, right?  It could be evocative, not to mention indulgent.  I just thought at the time that turning this challenge into assignments for my blog would be a decent outlet for me, my mind and our friendship with words.

Thinking about all the qualities and characteristics that make a good self-portrait made my head fight with me a little bit.  Too much self-ness.  Too much vulnerability.  Too many avenues to travel.  And to think that someone, anyone, else would give even a cursory nod in the direction of my writing esoterically about myself is at least a little vain.   

So, here it is.  This explanation of an exercise in self-portrait writing, is my self portrait for this first assignment.  Well.  That's convenient.  The three categories in the challenge are "PORTRAIT," "ARTISTIC" and "LANDSCAPE," and have their own sub-assignments, as it were; traditional landscape or zoomed in landscape, or head shot portraits, or artistic red.  This is hash-tagged on social media as "dogwood52."  Dogwood is the photography studio who first issued the challenge.  I prefer this type of challenge to throwing a bucket of cold water on my head.

Leaving the work of taking real photographs to my photographer daughter who does a better job at it than many, here's a picture I took of some leaves in a puddle.  It's pretty because leaves in rain are pretty.  

A Little Michael And Deborah Memory

The family that I was born into, is, to say the least, unusual.  I think we are peculiar and I think we've all felt the sting, as well as the grace of that, from the start.  And I think  much of that has to do with circumstances outside our ken and control, as well as with our own particular psyches and internal wiring.

The outside world has a name for people like us: "Those Armstrongs."  This is not necessarily brag. It is a sometimes lonely, often prideful, sometimes very confusing and painful fact. It can also be snug and lushly comforting.

Of course, everyone thinks he and his are special; unique and more hilarious than his neighbor.  I am not here to argue that.  In fact I know that no one's joy or pain or disappointment in/delight with the world is deeper, stronger, nor more heartfelt than anyone else's.

I'm just here to tell a story or two about some of those sui generis Armstrongs, even as I know the telling will not necessarily illuminate the unusual.  I just prefaced this story with that explanation because where unusual comes in is the not-easily-explainable nature of our ties to each other.

I've already introduced our seventh sibling, baby brother Michael.  I can never write the pith and heart of his excruciatingly wondrous drop--from a hole in heaven--into our lives; his dazzling childish poise, that fierce doting hovering he engendered, especially from his older sisters.

Writing recently about him and me and our doing things together, I keep thinking about an escapade (so much of what we did, I would call escapades because I wasn't the brightest, most careful caretaker and we actually had some "close calls" or some experiences that certainly could have become close calls) that we shared with our sister, Deborah.

In my mind's eye, the cover photo of this memory is of Deborah standing on one side of a raging canal, two children... Michael and Margie-- standing next to her, me straddling the canal on the cement walls that contained it and Georgie flapping like a flag in a windstorm as I held him by the hands to swing him over the water for Deborah to catch, his legs buffeted by the current.  She and I were grown enough to jump over, but the smaller, trusting children couldn't do that.  Not a deterrent to our determination to hike the mountains in Ogden to the rainbow's end in Waterfall Canyon.  We had successfully catapulted the others across without getting wet, but Michael had tried to put his feet down too early.  My laughter weakened me and Deborah scrambled to save the day.  Again.  She grabbed him by his waist as soon as I was able to hoist him closer to her, and we all laughed at danger.

We hiked up the trail that, at points, crossed the full and fast river, in the days before bridges were invented.  OK, well at least before they were placed over that river.  It was early run-off, then.  There was more hoisting kids over or sending and catching them on the other side.  There was climbing steep and rocky surfaces and throwing slimy moss at each other.  There was much chatter and laughter and many squeals at near misses on rolling river rocks. There were detours through the trees at places the river seemed to be too daunting and there was just plain grit at jumping from high rock faces into rushing water.

At one point on the way up, we had to cross where the river was too wide to jump and too deep and turbulent to enter.  There was a large flat rock in the middle of the crossing which I could straddle on one side and swing the kids to land upon, one at a time.  Then I would jump across to the other side of the river and each of them would leap into my arms, and I would cross again for the next one, but we lost momentum when Deborah suddenly panicked and couldn't jump to the mid-river rock landing.  We encouraged and cheered and instructed, but she just couldn't brave it for a few minutes until she finally made the first leap onto the large rock, frightening herself so much that she had to lie down.  Right there on that cold and wet and slippery rock.  Face down, her arms sprawled out to the side in an effort to grip and ground herself, she just lay there exclaiming that she couldn't move.  When I offered to cross back and help her up, she was adamant that I not come near her.  For several minutes she lay there, resembling a slow-moving, resting alligator, the roiling river disregarding her, swirling around and past her.  And then suddenly she was up, fairly flying into our midst on the other side.

On the return trip, she opted to forge her own trail through the trees, taking the two youngest, Michael and Georgie with her, to bypass that crossing.  Margie and I decided to try to take the shortest route, because, frankly, were just about done with that great adventure.

There was much well-deserved relief and gratitude in the dark by the time we reached our car for the trip home.