After lunch on Thursday the French teachers and I gathered up a trio of 8th graders to head off to Newark Airport, for the flight to London.

Click on the link and you can follow Monica's travels in England with the ninth-graders of Pinepoint School.

There are always certain currents in the flux of living that press us with a stressfulness -- to tighten the muscles of the neck and face and scalp -- to erode our good tempers with anxiousness and impatience -- to grapple at our ankles and thwart the dance.

Usually it's just a buffet here or there.  But not the last few weeks.

At work where a big project was going off the rails; and in an academic job hunt that was getting little traction; and Monica was off to London a week ago and I am leaving for France the day after tomorrow; and my parents are arriving and I've got to pack up the boys and batten the hatches and prepare the pets for a week and a half of gone-ness; and Porter was behind on his big homework project; and I'm not getting any exercise and I'd like a doctor to look at my jaw; and the Crossing Over ceremony for the webelos is closing in while my attention and competence ebbs away; and the economy is bad and maybe even terminal; and global climate shock is liable to make it all moot anyway; and I'm not getting any doses of spirituality at the Unitarian Church; and on top of all that there's no bread in the house to make sandwiches for the boys' lunch.

And I can't tell whether I have any of my shit together or not. 

Yeah, well, tomorrow I make like a shaman and braid all my distressing and disparate stress-currents into a nice wet tapestry of competence and preparedness.  'Cause I have to get on a plane to Paris, dammit.

Forcing spring,

Monica snapped a twig from the quince and set it in a vase.

The swelling buds and blossoms are a cheat, of course, but then, winter never plays fair either.

Photos by P.B.

On Sunday we had brunch in Essex at the Griswold Inn.  Nico especially loved the old, cluttered space.  Mmmmm . . . waffles.  A man on the town green was carving eagles from wood with a chainsaw, making a racket and a stench and an entertaining spectacle.  In the harbor the ice was melting and a flock of mergansers preened not far from a bald eagle strolling along the ice-edge.

We drove northward along the Connecticut river, stopping briefly at the winter carnival in Chester.  Crossing the river at the Goodspeed Opera House, we made our way down to Gillette Castle.  

From the cliffs Monica and I watched the eagles that over-winter there, while the boys raced around the grounds.  It's stunning to watch the great birds as they ride the air currents and hunt for fish in the river.

The winter wired household:

I spent the evening filing a couple of months worth of household bills, reports, receipts, bank statements, pay stubs and so on.  

They used to view the Cold War as a great contest between opposing ideologies -- the capitalistic open society versus the communist closed one.  But in reality each Weltanschauung (such as it was) lost out to the reigning ideological practice of the 20th century -- bureaucratism.  It is the bureaucracy that won.

And now, the struggle for the soul of the 21st century is not really West versus jihad or state versus terror.  It's about the valences of bureaucratism: two extreme and contrastive versions of the praxis.  On the one hand there is the bureaucracy as a utilitarian construction for a rule of law, procedure and objectivity -- something that could conceivably serve to bolster equality and even the common good.  (This is the reason why bureaucracies are created in the first place -- so that people get treated "fairly," and according to the rules.)

On the other hand, there is bureaucracy's capacity to serve as a framework for cronyism, corruption and just another arena for Machiavellian power play.  

In the American version of this, the Bush administration exemplified the latter valence.  Their impatience with the rule of law and their co-opting  the offices and regulations of governing to enrich themselves and their cronies may pale in comparison to China or Nigeria, but they are radicals by our standards.  The EU is probably the mirror image of this, with all its elaborate institutional contortions meant to bleed politics dry.

In a sense, if Al Qaeda actually were to exist as they portray it, its true radicalism would be not in its tired Islamicist posturing, but in its frightening effort to bureaucratize the practice of international terror.  

Food for thought in any case.

If I were going to do something utterly and fatally insane, it would be this:

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Holy crap.

When I was ten years old, growing up in Pennsylvania football country, the Steelers beat the Cowboys in one of the great Super Bowls of all time, on the pounding of Franco Harris and the artistry of Lynn Swan.  That kind of thing imprints itself upon you.  Last night history seemed to come full circle as we sat before the screens at C.C. O'Brien's with 10-year old Porter screaming at Big Ben, "Throw the ball!  No!  Throw the ball!"  And the hundred yard interception return?  Good God, I think Steeler nation was as prostrate at the end as Harrison was.

Porter spent some formative years in Cork where hurling and Man U reigned supreme, and then, since we've been back in the States, we haven't hooked up the TV.  So he's football deprived and maybe he won't have developed that section of the brain that is irrevocably susceptible to the sound of helmets clashing and the sight of big men in tights.  But, at least for last night's gridiron thriller he was as crazed a Steelers fan as a father could hope for.

Porter and a half dozen of the other fifth grade boys have joined the school jump-rope team, the Pine Point Pouncing Panthers.  3 practices a week, uniforms, a trip to "regionals" in New Hampshire in the spring.  It's athletic, even gymnastic, but this is the first year that boys have taken any interest, and I can see the other parents effortfully trying to not impose any old-school gender-expectations on their boys' new enthusiasm.  As the kids would say - lol.

As dawn comes I've been waking to the crowing of the neighbor's rooster -- and the slide-whistle song of the goldfinches.

Cathie challenged me to write down 25 random facts about myself.  Here they are:

1. I have always hated cooked green peas.  I think I always will.
2. I once spent 3 days on the tundra without seeing a single sign of human beings.
3. On the boys’ birthdays I always buy a newspaper and save it.
4. My beard comes in red, but not as red as my father’s; and gray, but not as gray as my father’s.
5. On my first day in Europe an old Turkish man shared his plum brandy with me and let me feel the hump on his back.
6. Except for a vaccination I have no scars more than a year or two old.
7. I met Monica at the employee Christmas party for the place where our significant others worked.
8. In 1995 I could write fieldnotes after 700 ml of vodka.
9. I’ve never gotten an A in a language class – not German, Russian, or Chinese.
10. I was robbed at gunpoint in Philadelphia after I’d broken up with my girlfriend at a Bob Dylan concert.
11. I will go to Paris for the first time in March.
12. While tending my grandmother’s store in the Poconos I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ 900 page epic poem, The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel.
13. My first buzz was from home made root beer at the family reunion when I was about 8 years old.
14. I sneeze whenever I walk into bright sunlight.
15. I prefer icy mountain lakes to warm Caribbean beaches.
16. I think consumerism will be the death of us all.
17. I celebrated my 21^st birthday in Munich, my 30^th in Almaty and my 40^th in Cork.
18. I wrote an unpublished science fiction novel.
19. I had my first wisdom tooth pulled out in Tijuana (stone cold sober).
20. The college application to Penn asked us to write an imaginary interview and I interviewed God.
21. I hitchhiked from Saginaw, Michigan, et cetera.
22. When I was a kid I thought that if the universe were infinite then the night sky should be white, because there'd be a star in every direction.
23. I’ve never been into a strip club or a karaoke bar.
24. Monica and I had our honeymoon canoeing in Algonquin Provincial Park.
    
25. I have drunk warm, fermented mare’s milk from a shepherd’s saddle flask in Kazakhstan.

Reflections on the inauguration . . . 

A great day and a demonstration of just why the US is an object of fascination in so much of the world.  The heady mix of public theater, human idiosyncrasy and raw power; the sheer audacity of this country rapturously giving their highest office to a black man.  The power of institutions that can so casually relegate G. W. Bush to political irrelevancy.  The vast crowd assembled to do nothing but witness and celebrate in frigid cold.

It made me laugh to hear that some of the pundits were disappointed that Obama's speech didn't produce any carve-into-granite catch phrases.   But Obama wasn't polishing his legacy with rhetorical flourishes, he was seizing an audience of tens of millions and he was communicating with them clearly and compellingly.  He was making his case.  I have no doubt that the punditocracy finds this unsettling and threatening.  (Not to over-dramaticize, but they cast themselves in the role of the old clergy who used Latin and other obfuscations to maintain their place as middlemen between the layperson and Truth.)  Obama did his best I think to bypass their summations.

Some progressives were annoyed by the fact that Rick Warren, an anti-gay evangelical preacher, gave the invocation, but I have to say that the juxtaposition between his prayer at the beginning and the Reverend Lowery's benediction at the end was not kind to Warren.  When it came to spiritual charisma, Warren was the nicely packaged bottled water next to the earthy wellspring that was Rev. Lowery.

igloo building . . . 

. . . and inside . . .

Saturday night was the cub scout's yearly winter campout at Alton Jones.  

Rich, Alex, Kinter and I were the only ones to take the night hike.  After a day of sledding in the bitter cold the cub scouts and the parents were happy enough to stay in the warmth of the lodge.

But the night was crisp and dark.  Only Alex had a light -- a headlamp on his forehead, but it was plenty for a snowy forest.  Especially since the crust of snow had smoothed all the rocks and hummocks and stumble spots into a gentler topography.  This snow has lain for a week and is crisscrossed with tracks of deer, hare, fox, mink, squirrel and coyote.

We walked out onto the white expanse of Eisenhower Lake.  Upon our cheeks the cold's sharp bite abated.  Cocooned under half a foot of ice the lake still transmits a gentle warmth.

Then the snow began to fall.  Perfect flakes that spiraled down through the beam of the lamp.  And we stood there each infused in quiet peace and pleasure.

Our bellies were full of lamb saag and naan, mouths still tingling from the rogan josh's red Kashmiri chiles.  Monica and I made our way to New London's Unitarian church for music.  Geoff Kaufman sang alone on the stage, a smallish, compact man with a clipped white beard.  He wore olive-colored corduroys with suspenders and a yellow collarless shirt and played guitar to folksongs and shanties.  

Among his songs was a fishermen's chant from Ghana, Ao Yona Eh, that was one of the most perfect pieces of music I've ever heard.  As Monica put it, there is some music that is already in your soul and the singer just reaches in to touch it.

He led into a performance by the phenomenal Moira Smiley and Voco.

Ah, what music!

Moira Smiley, Jess Basta and Aurelia Shrenker (who was filling in for the cellist, laid low by the New England winter) really seized the audience.  Ranging from Appalachia to Ireland to the Balkans to the Caucasus -- they took these musics and loved them and showed them enough respect to seize them and change them and make them their own.  And they mixed their beautiful voices together as if that were the simplest and most natural thing in the world.

Have a taste -- here's a one they shared (sung in this version by the quartet as it is whole):

Through a crust of snow the branching trails of mice show like varicose veins beneath white, shiny skin.  

For a moment it gave me a chill to imagine that I was walking upon the winter body of one of the frightful Irish fairies.

The morning's clear skies gave way to glowering steel as a storm crept up the coast.  I went with Maggie Jones and some birders out to Avery Point to watch the loons and mergansers.  Brants, compact and elegant, were dabbling for eelgrass.  The stormish light made the cinnamon plumage of the widgeons gleam strangely.

I'd left the boys at the Nature Center with Monica and their friends Jacob and Filip had joined them.  

After the birdwatching I trailed behind them as they made their way back to their house, where Sarka would make us cocoa and tea and we'd all wait for Monica to finish up her shift.  

I don't think they ever stopped chattering away at one another.

At the meadow, the four of them linked arms.  To the tune of the Oz song they chanted, "Follow the white flake road!" and skipped through the snow, laughing at their own cleverness.

This week a storm coated everything in a sheath of ice.

In the morning a breeze scraped the lilac against the house and for a moment I thought an animal was scrabbling heavily up the clapboards.

Rain fell and dripped from the icicles onto the hard and crusted snow. 

Another storm comes tomorrow.