Lee European Vacation

So, at the end of last year, when my parents, siblings, sibling-in-law and I planned our final route for our European vacation , one of the concerns was that we were trying to go to too many places in the two weeks--the last two weeks of July--we had available. We had seven countries--Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria--on the agenda. When we got to Europe and mentioned our plans to any European, the response was almost universally one of horror, for Europeans (including my brother-in-law Basilios) generally like to vacation for several weeks in one spot and really relax and savor the local culture. In addition to worries about trying to do too much, I also worried that seven of us might not all get along traveling together in a small RV. But I think everybody enjoyed the trip. I know I did. Below I'll do a skeleton sketch of some of the places we visited. Sorry about the many photos. I had over 1000 to choose from, and the thirty or so here seem to me like a pathetically small sampling (I really wish Blogger would come up with an easier way to build posts with photos and words).

We started our journey in Munich, Germany, and then spent a day driving along the Romantic Road, which is basically a series of towns and castles that preserve a middle-ages flair.
















Next, we picked up my sister Trudie and her husband Basilios and headed for Switzerland, where we visited Zurich and Zermatt. Zurich had good food and a relaxing atmosphere.








































Zermatt is a little town at the bottom of Switzerland. It is so deep into the Alps that no roads go beyond it; Zermatt is a dead-end town, but a really cool one. It is the leaping-off point for people who want to climb the Matterhorn and a tourist destination for people like us who just want to see the Matterhorn. My sisters Trudie and Kristinia and my brother Clinton and I took a cog-wheel train up to the top of the Gornergrat, where we had terrific views of the surrounding mountaintops and glacier fields. We hiked back down, which was a little more strenuous and took a little longer than we had anticipated (we were all pretty sore for a few days afterward), but hiking through the Alps was one of the highlights of the trip.



































































After that, we decided that, since we were there, we should catch some Tour de France action. So we stopped in at Bourg Saint Maurice, which was the start of one of the legs of the race. It was too crowded to see the starting line of that day's leg but we got to see all the cyclists getting ready and appreciated the tremendous effort that goes into this race. We also got to see Lance (swoon) leave his team's bus and ride down to the starting line.















From there, we journeyed to Barcelona, Spain. At first, the heat was stifling, and the traffic, with hundreds of motorized scooters aggressively swarming like wasps between cars, was stressful. But we soon adjusted to the heat and began taking the public transit instead of driving the unwieldy RV, and when we started playing in the Mediterranean, we started to really like Barcelona. One side note: all of the males on the trip were injured except Basilios. My dad had recently tripped and messed up his knee. Two weeks before the trip, I broke my collarbone diving for a catch while playing ultimate Frisbee, and two days before the trip Clinton sliced his hand wide open (notice the blue surgical glove he is wearing to keep from getting his hand wet--it didn't work). So Basilios was the only male who could enjoy the water injury-free, and he did enjoy it, diving under the waves like a giddy seal.
In the city, we visited the Picaso Musuem, which shows the evolution of his artistic vision from his days as a student through his cubist works. We also toured the masterpiece of Gaudi--an influential modernist architect--La Sagrada Familia, an astounding building, and walked around the Gothic Quarter (narrow, medieval-feeling streets packed with little shops, musuems, and a few old churches), and down Las Ramblas (a main pedestrian boulevard that is lined with little shops. Strangely, many of these temporary shops were pet stores). Barcelona is a city I wouldn't mind returning to.




















On our way to Verona, Italy, we stopped for a day on the beach near the French Riviera town of Frejus. This stop was definitely too short. The weather, sand, and water were nearly perfect. We were sad to leave. We lived it up while we could, dancing at the campground discoteque, going swimming in the Mediterranean at midnight, and going swimming again in the morning.
































In Verona, we watched Verdi's Aida in a Roman arena, built in 30 A.D. While the opera went sort of late (it ended at 1:30 a.m.), the experience of listening to and watching this well-performed masterpiece in a 2000-year-old venue with great acoustics was well worth it.














Venice was next on our list, and while the town was overrun with tourists like us, it was still impressive. The floor mosaics on the church floors were one of many artistic flourishes that struck me. Venice is very photogenic. Basilios, whose father is Greek, was able to point out many of the Byzantine influences throughout the city. Although everyone knows it is a problem, it was still sad to see the Adriatic Sea lapping at the tops of the last barriers that stand between the city and a flooded ruin.











































For various reasons, I don't have photos of our journey through Slovenia (a green, hilly, quiet country, where we stopped in at Izola and waded into the Adriatic Sea) and Austria, where we visited Graz and Vienna. In Vienna, I missed Elizabeth the most. We had been there nine years earlier as adventurous, backpacking newlyweds, and memories of us together flashed their way back into my consciousness. She and I will have to go back in the near future. As with most of our other stops, we only got a tiny taste of Vienna, and of all the places we visited, I think this is the city where I would have most liked to spend more time.

Even though the trip was rushed, and we weren't able to stay anywhere as long as we would have liked, I'm glad we went, and I'm glad we were able to see so many sites, eat so many different types of food, smell so many different smells, speak (0r try to speak) so many different languages, and swim in different bodies of water. It was a memorable trip that will give each of us different choices of places we might visit in any future trips.

The Beginnings of Harmful Intent, or When Do We Start Wanting to Hurt People?

Recently Rowyn has been more of a challenge to put to bed at night. I used to be able to lay her down on the bed, place a pillow one one side, and cuddle up to her other side, and then she would go to sleep. Or if she was having a difficult time, I would hold her in my arms and bounce her lightly while swaying from side to side. This would take longer (20-30 minutes), but it worked well. (I don't want to give the impression with this post that I'm some kind of super dad who puts the kids to be all the time. Elizabeth ends up putting Rowyn to bed 90% of the time, but I've noticed a few things the last few times I've helped her fall asleep).

However, a couple of times when I've recently tried to put her to bed, neither of these techniques have worked. For a week or two, Rowyn took to arching her back, screaming, and thrashing about while going to sleep (or not going to sleep, as was more often the case). She created a marvelous spectacle; she almost seemed possessed by evil spirits. But what really caught my attention was not the squirming, arching, and angry screaming, but the way that in the midst of her apparent fury, she would reach up her plump warm fingers and trace them softly, tenderly even, along my cheek or chin or nose. The contradiction in such moments between her touch and her demeanor was almost surreal.

The first time she did this, I cringed at first because I expected her to try to scratch me or pinch me or pull a few strands of my pathetically thin beard. She was upset and I thought she would lash out at the person nearest her--in these cases, me. I thought such reactions were more or less instinctual, especially in the pre-verbal and early-verbal stages, when part of a person's frustration likely arises from not being able to make oneself understood. If a baby or toddler was frustrated, I thought, it would be natural for that kid to want to bite or scratch or hit. But no matter her emotional state, Rowyn has never shown toward me any sense of malice. It makes me wonder where hurtful responses come from in children. At what point do we begin to desire to hurt others? Is it learned? Do some kids just demonstrate their anger more physically than others? If so, why? Genetics? Parental influence? Diet?

I suppose these are more or less fruitless, unanswerable questions, but they have been on my mind since the first time 11-month-old, in the middle of an awful fit, reached up to my face and told me through her fingertips not that she was frustrated with me, but that she loved me. And why did this surprise me?

A Good Weekend

So, I know not too long ago I was lamenting the lack of snow, but this weekend made me really look forward to the coming summer. Here is a chronicle of the weekend:

Saturday we went to Klemgard County Park, a great park that is nestled in to a long valley, which is only about 8 miles away from our house. We hiked on part of the hiking trail, crossed an old bridge that spans nothing and goes nowhere,

























had a picnic under the old bower,


















and played on the playground.




























That evening, while I watched the kids, Elizabeth cooked one of our favorite meals. I'm not sure what the name of it is (if it even has a name), but it is a pasta dish with bacon, capers, lightly sauteed zucchini, onions, and sun-dried tomatoes. It is all mixed up together along with a Gorgonzola and white wine sauce.

After the kids were in bed, Elizabeth and I watched Before Sunrise, the prequel to Before Sunset, both excellent films (we watched the sequel first a couple of months ago), though Before Sunset is the better of the two, in our opinion. It was Valentine's Day and we are not usually V-Day people, but we sort of caught the Valentine's spirit and talked about how in love and happy we are. Even though we know we feel this way, it is good to verbalize it occasionally.

Sunday was a slow, lazy day. We went to church, came home, I took a nap, we went for a walk, cooked dinner, put the kids to bed, and then read and surfed the Internet.

Today, President's Day, was busy, but in a good way. This morning, Sonora and I went outside and trimmed some of the apple trees. We also spent some time climbing the trees
and playing ponies (Sonora's latest obsession). Some of the prettier apple branch clippings we bundled into a stick bouquet that we later presented to Elizabeth, who had been inside working and taking care of Rowyn.

After about an hour and a half of tree trimming, Sonora and I decided to build our first fairy house. Sonora has been curious about fairy houses since watching the movie Kristen's Fairy House, a gift from her aunt Vanessa. We chose a secluded spot behind the wood pile at the edge of our back yard. We used a sparkly rock as the floor and constructed the little dwelling out of as many pieces of curved wood as we could find. It's not an elaborate house, but it was fun and Sonora is half convinced that a fairy is going to move in.

When the fairy house was done, we ate lunch, went for a long walk together, played in the park, washed out buckets for food storage, cleaned out the garage, washed the cars, cooked and then ate dinner, and put the kids to bed. I still have a few hours of grading to do tonight, but this weekend was mostly free of school work. We were able simply to be together, which was really nice, though it made me long for summer. Mid-June, which is when my summer break starts, is still a long way off.

Death Anxieties and Childish Insights

So, over the past six months or so, while commuting to and from work, while working in the yard, while doing the dishes, I've been listening to lectures on literature, partially out of interest in literature and partially to get ready for the GRE literature subject test. So far, I've listened to over 100 hours of lectures on literature. To tell you the truth, I really like the insights they provide into the works themselves and the tastes of the works I get from the lectures. However, the literary topics covered are kind of heavy and often sort of pessimistic. I'm not anti-pessimism--sometimes being pessimistic can be really fun and kind of energizing in a weird way, sort of like how saying "Screw it all," and meaning it, can be sort of freeing--but too much pessimism can become tiresome.

(This will be a rather lengthy aside, but here is an example of a warm/fuzzy segment from Georg Buchner's unfinished early nineteenth-century play Woyzeck. The grandkids have asked the grandmother to tell them a good night story and this is her response. Note: this is my own translation from the German, so there might be a few errors:
"Come here, you little crabs! Once upon a time there was a poor child who had no father and no mother. Everyone was dead; there was no one left in the world. Everyone dead, but still the child searched day and night. And because there was no one left on the earth, the child wanted to go up into heaven, and the moon looked down so friendly on the child. When the child got to the moon, it was just a chunk of rotten wood. And then the child went to the sun, but it was just a withered sunflower. And when the child got to the stars, they were little golden mosquitoes, stuck up there like the red-backed shrike sticks them on the sloe. And so the child decided to come back to earth, but the earth was a sunken harbor. And the child was totally alone. And the child sat down and cried, and there the child still sits and is completely alone." Nice bed-time story from Granny, eh?)

A lot of the heaviness from these works of literature has to do with the fear of death and what happens after death. This fear, of course, is as old as consciousness, and even religion can't cure people of it entirely, because, even for the faithful, there is a fear of hell or rebirth or the telestial kingdom, or the nagging doubt that God will turn out to be just like Santa Clause: a comforting fiction. So probably most people are afraid, in one way or another, of what happens after their last breath.

Now, I'm one of those people who believe in God and the afterlife and, truth be told, the thought of death doesn't produce in me a lot of anxiety, but in the same way that it can be fun to toy with pessimism, I sometimes like to imagine death as simply an end to existence, a vacuum, an eternal state of non-perception. This line of thought is thrilling to me in the same way playing "Bloody Mary" was exciting as a kid, or the way it was thrilling and terrifying to imagine that skinwalkers-who-ran-fast-as-cars were real and that they ventured off the nearby Navajo reservation to prey on people in villages just like mine. But I also realize that for many people the fear of death is real. I'm also convinced that death is a difficult concept for any person, regardless of conviction, who has really thought about it.

Anyway, this is to say that these lit lectures have me thinking about the fear of death, and thinking about people thinking about the fear of death--and its inverse, the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life--a lot lately. And this has led me to wonder about what the idea of death means to a kid.

As near I can tell, Sonora first encountered death as a concept when she was two. I can't remember the details, but she was on a hike with Elizabeth and they came upon a recently dead bird. It was bleeding out the mouth and Sonora squatted to examine it. She determined that the bird was painting, not bleeding, that the small, bright crimson pool was the bird's way of creating and sharing art. Elizabeth did not correct Sonora's interpretation, and I think the contradiction--painting, not bleeding; creating, not dying--sort of broke Elizabeth's heart while it also made her laugh.

The next time I can think of when Sonora encountered death was about six months or a year later when she and I were on a walk and she noticed a large ring-necked pheasant lying dead on the shoulder of the road. She asked me what was wrong with it and I told her it was dead. Then I felt compelled to explain what death is--that it is when the body dies and the spirit leaves the body and the body gets eaten by other animals, and doesn't ever move again of its own volition. This led to a discussion of humans and death and, being the sort of lay-it-all-out-there sort of person I am, I told her that she would die one day and Mom and Dad would die, that everyone dies eventually (thinking back on it now, I feel a bit like the grandma in Buchner's play, mentioned above) and that that is okay because the spirit lives on and goes to heaven, etc.

Since then, I think Sonora has spent a bit of time thinking about death. She talks about it when she sees a dead insect or any dead animal or when a character dies on a movie she has watched. She seems mostly okay with it now, but for about a year or so, I think it challenged her conception of life and made her a little more anxious than she might otherwise have been. For example, about six months ago, the plug in our bathroom sink broke. It was one of those metal plugs that is linked to a plunger you can pull up or push down to engage or disengage the plug from the sink. It took me about two weeks to get around to fixing the plug and in the meantime the drain was just open, a black circle with no net, no trap, no security, that the water ran down. Before the plug broke, even when it was disengaged, the plug had provided a sort of safety net to any but the smallest items that were dropped in the sink. One time, when the plug was absent from the sink, Sonora accidentally dropped a small hair barrette down the drain and it slipped into the hole. That ruined her whole day. She wept and shook and asked over and over where it would go. Where would the barrette go that fell down the hole? From then on, she was obsessed with keeping things away from the drain--barrettes, toothbrushes, even things much too large to fall in, like cups and the soap dispenser--so that they wouldn't fall down the hole and suddenly be gone for ever. When I finally repaired the sink so that the plug could go back in, she was visibly relieved. There have been very few things that have upset her as much as the sight and reality of that drain did. This may be a stretch, but I chalk up her fear of the unplugged drain to her anxiety about death. Death is the drain that life suddenly falls into and is then apparently gone forever.

The other instance that led me to believe she ruminates on death occurred when I was driving her to her friend's house for preschool. Out of the blue, she asked me "Daddy, what is under the earth?" I told her, as simply as I could, about dirt and rocks and layers floating on a sort of volcanic marshmallow layer, which led to a cursory explanation of volcanic activity, but her question, I came to understand as we talked, was not "what is the earth made of," but "how stable is the earth? Is it like an egg shell that can crack open and swallow us up?" Again, it was the idea of everything disappearing in a flash that was on her mind.

I guess what this all has taught, or at least reiterated to me is that we humans have a tough reality: from the moment we begin to be conscious of ourselves, we begin to recognize that we will die. For whatever reason, this realization creates a lot of distress in us, and we deal with it in different ways. A lot of art--literary and otherwise--has been created as a way to explore, examine, and cope with the realization of universal mortality and with the thought that "I, too, will die," which feels very profound. Of course, we've got a lot of stuff going on which keeps the wolf (in this case, the wolf is not death, but the idea of death) at bay: love, family, food, work, television, sports, politics, video games, music, hobbies, books, friends, church, school, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, and schedules. So many plugs to hide that awful yawning black hole in the bottom of the sink.

Virtual Bird Mate

"Come here; I want to show you something," my boss said to me the other day. He pointed out his office window at a bird and told me to watch it. The brownish-gray bird, a little bigger than a sparrow in size, was just then perched on top of the side-view mirror of a van. The bird hopped down so that it was facing the mirror; its feet clung to the rim just underneath the mirror and the bird had to flap its wings to keep from falling off of its thin perch. But it wasn't just flapping its wings to stay put. It was spreading its wings more widely and puffing out its breast more broadly than necessary while rubbing its open beak on the mirror.

I realized why my boss wanted me to see this: the bird was courting the van mirror. "He's been doing this for at least two hours," my boss told me. I watched the bird for a few more minutes as it hopped back up above the mirror, then flailed around in front of the mirror again, then repeated its actions. After a while, it gave up and moved to the mirror of the car parked next to the van, hoping to have more luck courting the virtual bird in that mirror. It was humorous, but also somewhat heartbreaking, to watch this bird try to build a relationship, try to connect with, a reflection.

There's a message somewhere in this, I told myself. An obvious one is that human industry messes with wildlife in innumerable ways. But that "lesson" didn't resonate deeply enough. I've seen other things--starved deer hanging from barbed wire fences, for example--that have driven that point home more successfully. The missive that seemed to fit best had more, I think, to do with connection, illusory connection.

The radio and television provide a sense of connection to people that is an illusion, but I think we mostly know that it is an illusion, and are therefore charmed as much as seduced by these media. But the Internet, I'm beginning to think, is more seductive in convincing us that we are part of something larger. On the internet, people who haven't seen each other for many years, and very likely will never actually see each other again, ever, "connect" through the Internet. I've become "friends" with many old acquaintances on Facebook, for example, though after a few exchanges of "what have you been up to for the last 15 years," we usually lose interest in each other and sort of forget that we had re-connected. Such re-connections are enjoyable and make one feel momentarily young and alive, but, at least in my experience, tend to be short-lived. Even Facebook connections I have with my siblings and other family members are, after a few ecstatic Hello-how-are-yous, left untended.

Another example of a mirror is this blog and some of the other blogs I read. I can update people on what is going on with Elizabeth, me, and the girls. I can read about other people's families, their travels, accomplishments, and even sometimes their sorrows. This is rather convenient and, again, makes me feel a sense of connection with some of the people I care about. However, a blog entry is a poor substitute for a conversation over warm cocoa. It is no replacement for a handshake, an embrace, an understanding glance, a shared laugh.

I suppose the bird-mirror/human-Internet comparison breaks down at some point: unlike the bird and the mirror, Internet communication does have at each end an actual human. In essence, with the Internet, there IS a bird on the other side of the glass. The sad thing, though, is that the glass barrier is there and the birds, for all our flapping wings, can not touch.

Christmas Eve in Our Town

So, I meant to write about this a while ago, but never got around to it. Normally, if I wait too long, I don't get back around to writing about an event, but this one was unique enough to hold onto.

For Christmas Eve, we decided to go to the local community church, which, actually, is the only church in our town (there is another church building in town, but it is currently functioning as a duplex, not as a place of worship). The church had advertised its Christmas Eve meeting by setting up outside the post office a small plywood A-frame to which was stapled a letter-sized invitation to everyone.

We had been intending to go to church here ever since we moved into the town a year and a half ago, but we had never made it. That night, we dressed up in casual semi-formal clothes and hurried off so as not to be late. Turns out we were over-dressed and, though we arrived one or two minutes late, we were early. About 25 people in all showed up that night. 15 minutes after the advertised start time, the service began. A woman and a man co-led the service.

I want to pause here to give you the setting of the place: it is a wooden church, painted white on the outside, that is perhaps 60 years old. The floors were a little creaky, but were covered in red carpet. Two rows of pews face a podium which sits upon a slightly raised landing. On the right-hand side of the landing was a piano, before which Elizabeth now sat. On the left-hand side were a couple of electric guitars and a set of drums (apparently someone who attended there could play some instruments). The ceiling was vaulted, but, with old exposed beams, felt more like a nice barn than a cathedral. However, despite its rough appearance, it had a welcoming, non-pretentious warmth to it. In some ways the building reminded me of the local Grange halls near the tiny village in southwestern Colorado where I grew up. The community would hold square dances, charity dinners, auctions, and other gatherings in these halls. This little church felt sort of like a sanctified Grange hall.

"Unfortunately," the woman said as a disclaimer at she began the service, "we won't be having any music tonight. That is, unless one of you out there happens to play the piano." She chuckled at the suggestion, presumably because she was acquainted with everyone in the congregation besides us and knew that none of them played. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elizabeth's hand slowly raising itself, almost unbidden, until the woman turned her attention to my shy wife.

"Really? You can play the piano?" the woman asked. Elizabeth nodded.

"And you'd be willing to play tonight?" Again Elizabeth nodded. "Thank the Lord!" the woman said. She gave Elizabeth the name of the first song, and then went about searching through the hymnal and scratching together a list of songs while someone else began reading the Christmas story found in Luke.

As Luke 2 and then Matthew 2 were read aloud, the reader would stop after each major plot occurrence and children would come forward with the appropriate ceramic figurines of a manger scene. Sonora had been given a wise man and when it came time to take up her piece, she proceeded with full concentration to the little stable that was set up on a card table in front of the podium and carefully set the stoic wise man in place, then returned to me.

At each of these pauses, we would sing a song to Elizabeth's piano playing. No one led the music; the woman would just sort of nod in Elizabeth's direction and then she would play a short introduction and then begin the song. I really could not believe that Elizabeth was playing at all. She is person who is generally reserved, afraid to call attention to herself. Recently, she became very sweaty, shaky, and rather nauseaus simply from giving a presentation to a group of women about sprouting. Most of the meeting I stared at her back in disbelief (After the meeting, when I expressed my surprise to her, she said "You can't have Christmas Eve with no music. That would just be sad.") In between songs, she would flip the hymnal open to the next song and brush her fingers silently across the keys in order to practice the song in her head. She played quite well the five or so songs that were given to her.

At the end of the meeting, the man leading the meeting called our attention to a cake at the front of the room. It was coated in white frosting and, written across the cake in red frosting were the words "Happy Birthday Jesus." He lit the fourteen or so candles (I have no idea how they chose the number of candles) and then called the kids up to blow out the candles. Sonora contributed by blowing on the elbow of the older girl in front of her.

Then we retired to an adjoining multi-purpose room where some tables had been set up, and we ate cake and drank water. No one approached us to ask our names or find out where we lived or to see if we would be coming back, or to talk to us at all. It was as if, somehow, they had expected a complete stranger and her family to appear unannounced and play the piano for the Christmas Eve service.

Although the service was poorly planned and poorly attended, I was impressed by a congregation that has the faith to produce, out of thin air and my normally shy wife, a musician to play for their Christmas program.

The Snow is Gone

A week and a half ago, we had snow,


snow,




snow,




snow,



snow.



It had been cold and snowing for three weeks.

We received a package we had ordered a few weeks earlier: a conversion kit for our bike trailer that would make it so we could pull the kids behind us while we cross-country skied.





We tried it out that Monday night and skied around the streets of our village: up and down some of the smaller hills, to the ends and back of a few dead-end streets, back and forth on the only paved street, and finally, out on a county road that winds along beside the creek. It was fun. We felt free. In the darkness we slid silently along the roadways in between rows of houses made cozy with snow.



It is sometimes hard to find ways to exercise, to get outside as a family, during the winter, but we decided this was going to be our activity. We would travel the back roads that spiral away from our back-road town.

And then, the next day, everything began to melt. It rained for a few days, and then it was sunny. The creek swelled to five or six times its normal size. The roads turned to gravelly mud. The sledding hill turned to green grass. Birds can often be heard chirping. A few days ago, we went to the park and played for a while. I rode my bike to work the other day and was not uncomfortably cold.

It is more convenient with the snow gone. My back likes not shoveling the driveway. We can drive more quickly on the roads.

However, our little cross-country ski rickshaw is still fully assembled, waiting, in the garage. The long poles that lead out from the body of it, the poles that connect Dad or Mom to the carriage, seem to yearn like a lonely person's arms. "Where is the snow?" it seems to be asking me every time I visit.