Ahh, the sweet milk of human kindness flows richly here in Missouri. Just sitting around swapping stories about our lives with my Dad's family is restorative. We had a day with no highway driving, just visiting with my father's brother and his family. We slept late (or had a nice quiet morning of zazen, coffee and a bath), visited the lovely Jasper County Courthouse, had a bit of a tantrum in the sandwich store on the square, went through two antique/new again stores yelling "Wow, they have a ....." and touching it, then moving on and yelling, "Wow, they have a ...." and touching that. My son seemed as thrilled by the really old metal sausage makers and iron hooks and other farm tools as by the old-school metal Tonka trucks. After much talk about how we could only buy small things because we are short on space, he and his sister found some tiny cute things that one hopes will be good for several hours of play. Rather than nap time, we had 2 second cousins come over for play; that was pretty fun until exhaustion made the play more about telling on each other and my son angrily yelling at the older cousin. The younger cousin is 11 months and at that peak of charmingness where he's not walking yet but can reach everything and stops to smile at any nearby adults every few minutes.
You'll note I primarily was shadowing the 3 year old. The 8 year probably had a different take on being the only girl among 4 cousins, although she's had a dog to play with and spoil.
We went out to a excellent Chinese buffet, but the three year old had one of his mega meltdowns leading to a short car ride and what I hoped would be the beginning of a long nights sleep and turned out to just be the beginning of a short nap.
I finally found the first book I read on the trip, Frank Herbert's White Plague. It's a sort of grisly book - a biogeneticist has his wife and children killed by a bomb and goes mad and then makes a plague that kills all the women in the countries that were involved in the bomb that hurt his family. Fortunately, he goes sane and helps solve the plague and indeed it turns out he's discovered enough about the human genome/cell that everyone who survives the plague and it's associated descent into savagery will live 5,000 years. I hadn't planned on rereading it, but picked it up during the book package phase. The perils of moving for me.
Today we are hoping to make good milleage; my daughter's school starts with a picnic on Tuesday and classroom on Wednesday. We are hoping to make it in time, although my beloved life partner and I are having trouble forging a concensus plan on how to do that without a completely inhumane car ride that also misses the chance to see some of the amazing and quirky things we drive by. She wants to turn on the DVD player and just drive, and I'm trying to have a slower pace and then end up with one really long day down from the mountains into CA. We'll see what new synthesis arises from our never easy dialectic.
Today is supposed to be very flat. I understand (from the excellent book "Earth" by David Brin") that you can't find any rocks in Kansas except for meteorites. It's just dust/soil blown down from the rockies and covering the underlying rocks enourmously. We'll see that too!
From now until the Bay area, I'll be seeing things and places I've never seen before. As C.S. Lewis writes, "Onwards and Upwards!"
Leave a comment