Lakota

Several hundred dust devils, like fingers, were tracing their way across the drought-dead soil.  I tried to chase them, but I could never catch them.  Then I saw human shapes in those dust devils, formed out of bone-dry soil and air, dancing playfully.

"Who are you people?"

They ignored me.

"What are you people?" I whispered to myself this time.

I was thirsty.  Dust was sticking to my sweat.  I must have been delusional.  I followed.  God hep me, I followed.  For good or ill, I followed.

Visit with Doug and Point Pelee

Having finished summer school and with about two weeks to go before heading back to work, and not having had much of a vacation, I took a couple of days to get out and do something with what time I have.  I've got tons of work to do on this old house and all kinds of things I need to tend to.  BUT...I also have to attend to my need for some R & R.  So I decided to go visit a friend of mine from Abu Dhabi Days.  His name is Doug and he lives in Windsor with his sister, Pat.  So I took Peter with me and spent the day with Doug, who finally was able to return my long lost spatula that had vanished when I lived in Abu Dhabi.  It's been quite a quest to return the sacred spatula to the owner who's name is clearly written on the handle.  I will now associate it with Doug every time I grill hamburgers in honer of those marvelous cook outs he used ot host at the old villa.

I was worried that Peter would be bored, but he loved Doug's humor.  He chuckles even now at Doug's frequent use of "Shud up!" with his incredulous tone.  He also loved to hear the stories of people and  the things we had done during my time there.  Peter was just starting high school when I left to work in Abu Dhabi.  I had planned to be gone for just six months, but it turned out to be three years.  That was very painful for both Peter and me.  Don't get me wrong, I loved teaching the Arabs, I loved going on adventures, and I loved all the different cultures--I even loved the city of Abu Dhabi; but I worried, quite a bit, about Peter.  My daughter was in college and is great with Skype or gmail.  She'd check in all the time.  Peter needed my physical presence and that was the hardest thing for both of us.  He told me that listening me talk to Doug gave him a bigger picture of what life must have been like for me over there.

Doug took us to Amherstberg, to Fort Maldan.  It was an historical fort built by the British during the war of 1812.  The docents there were dress in clothing from that period and first greeted us in French.   We ambled about the fort and then stopped to watch a muzzle loading and firing demonstration, took our picture and then split for some of that wonderful Horton's coffee.  It seemed like a Tim Horton's coffee shop there is on just about every street corner. 

The following day we said goodbye to Doug and Pat and as I was leaving I missed the exit to the Ambassador Bridge and found myself back in Amhersburg again and said, "What the heck, let's just explore."  We ended up going to a wonderful place called Point Pelee.  It is a Canadian national park.  An isthmus that runs out into Lake Erie.  It looks to me, as I said in the video, like a wasp stinger. (Oh dang, I just realized that I misspelled "Lake Erie" on my map.  Isn't that eerie?  

What a beautiful place!  Butterflies were everywhere.  It was really hard to catch them on video, but I got a few.  I mention this because Pat told me that this is the place the Monarch Butterflies gather in mass before making their annual journey to Mexico.  I was also surprised to see cactus--I'm thinking they call these prickly pears, but I'm not sure.  according to the signs posted on the pathways, the isthmus is being restored to savanna.  All kinds of plants had been put there, along with many that I am familiar with. 



Peter and I walked all the way down to the point.  Most of the way we saw very few people.  The beach was empty and very remote, but when we got to the very tip, we saw a lot of people who took the shuttle who were now out wading in the water and taking pictures. It was a lovely place.  I have to say I enjoyed the hike even more.  We also went to the wetlands area while we were there.  It was a bit of a tourist kind of place, but I appreciated the effort to educate the public about the wetlands and I'm glad that places like this are protected.  Mostly I was just grateful for perfect weather, and time with Peter.

How to Make Wooden Spoons

I'm not a great carver.  I'm altogether too impatient, too clumsy and a bit too satisfied with less than perfect.  I also don't have all the tools I need to do it right  That said, carving is a lot of fun and another outlet for my insatiable need to be creative.  For this blog, I decided to share with you, dear readers, how I make my wooden spoons.  I made some these spoons quite a while back.  I also made some pretty nice wands for my family for the Harry Potter Book party when book six came out.  I was getting pretty good at carvings when I did the wands, now I'm working my way back to that level. 

For materials, mostly I just use a jig saw, a utility knife and an exacto-knife, some chisels and sand paper.  O, and for this project a 1" X 6" pine board.  That's pretty much it. 
When it comes to the video, I don't know what happened to a lot of what I recorded--it vanished!  My bytes must have been bitten!  I was going to make it all music and no words, but I liked my on running commentary.  Stop gaps, I don't explain well.  They are essential in carving.  What you do is to cut deep straight down into the wood across the grain.  Then when you cut the wood, you push your knife along the grain digging at an angle untill your knife hist the stop gap.  It keeps the kinf from going to far and cutting areas you want left higher.  You'll have to just watch and see how it's done.

Illustrations for Peter the Pirate

I recently ran across some old illustrations I did for my Peter the Pirate stories.  I drew them quite a while before I went off to the UAE. and they've been stored in a manilla envelope for nearly 5 years.  I took them and scanned them and then using those scans, I put backgound color to them on the powerpoint program so then had some color and mood to them. 

 

This is is from one of the Christmas stories called "Chirstmas Island" 
I never finished the illustration and I haven't put the story on the blog just yet

 

This is Peter talking to his dead mother in the underworld called "Dreamland"
Peter was taken from her when he was a boy by the British Navey.  Up until that time
she had been an American loyalist, but this practice of essentially kidnapping
young men to serve on the King's ship under inhuman conditions is one of many points
of contention that led to the eventual revolution.



This is the Botanist.  He was  naturalist and empiricist. 
He is another shade that Peter meets in the underworld.  The Botanist
lives on an Island of his own creation, but refuses to believe he is
dead, choosing to still live according to the rules of his empiricist
belief.  Peter has tremendous love and respect for him all the same.



The Little Wooden Fool
Was a peace offering from the man who ruined Peter's life.  He was a cruel, petty
Captain uner whom Peter Served.  His cruel ways led to a mutany.  His life was spared and
the mutany was bloodless due to Peter's intervention, but mutany is mutany, and there
was no other option, even for honerable men, than to take up the life of piracy.



Careem, a Maldive prince who became Peter's closest friend and spiritual twin.



Most of these illustrations are from the--well--epic adventure called, "the Commodore's Journey"  If you can imagine a ballad going on for about a hundred pages and is still unfinished that's how long it is.   As for the look of the illustrations, I was hoping that they would have a sort of woodcut look to them--at least that was what I was going for.  The idea being that this story takes place sometime between 1750 to about the time of the American Revolution so a woodcut seemed appropriate.  If I could make them look more like scrimshaw, I would--that would be far more appropriate.





The Tower Black
This is deep down in the caves below the iceshelves of the antarctic.  It is the setting
for the climax of the Commodore's Journey







Sammy Kirkendol, a ghost, and former member of Peter's crew.  In this picture he is doing his best to help
Peter in his promise to find a certain spirit in Cold Black Bay in the antarctic.  Sammy warns him
of Edmund Black and his many traps.



The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 22 & 23

I didn't post during the month of June.  I try to get a least a couple of posts in every month, but I've been distracted by a number of personal issues. I actually recorded these two chapters quite a while back and never got around to putting it all together. 

The Ghost in the Cloud series is, as I've said before, a kind of graphic novel/comic book only without the pictures. Chapter 22 focuses on Angelina's Mother, who has thus far remained a background person.  Chapter 23 picks up with Angelina's deal with Baba Yaga.  She has agreed to give Baba Yaga ten minutes of her time and is about to find out just what that means.

Sketches



This was done by a pencil
with a peace sign on it!

 



 I have a number of ideas for my blog, but they are all taking more time to get together than I seem to have at this point in my life.  So, in this blog, I thought I’d try to get away from music, videos , poetry, educational reflections and writing and do some old fashioned art work.  I’m not nearly the artist my daughter is or that my friend Melanie is, for that matter, but I thought I’d get back into my art work for a while. 

I’m working a bit more with shading and highlights.  I think, soon, I want to work more on eyes.   A good eye is hard to get and to line two of them up in correct proportions and have both eyes fixed on a specific point is tough for me.  Then I also need to get the highlights right on the glossy surface, and then there are those little shadows made by the lids that have to be done right for the sake of dimension and/or depth.

It reads:
"the pencil is mightier than the sword."

I like fingers—though I still have far to go to get them right.  I like them because they are crooked.  I like the look of the hands of really old people.  Their hands have stories to them through years of things those hands have done

I’m in a draw phase. I don’t know why I go in cycles like this.  Sometimes I will spend my time reading, which I like to do, but then I get away from reading and write.  Then I can’t write so I make music, and then I can’t do music so I draw and so forth.  I end up being a jack of all creative trades but master of none. 



A lot of things I create I end up posting on this blog.  I do so because I am human, and it is in our human nature to share what we do.  Even though I post my stuff here, I know that not too many people see it—perhaps only about fifty or so people, even though  I average between two to three hundred “views” a month, but really, I suspect that actual views are mostly from friends and relatives.  Sometimes there are more views, sometimes less.  I know this from the stats page and from hits on my YouTube videos which are embedded here.



It's a really cool pencil.



  It doesn’t matter to me that not too many people see what I make--I left the fantasy of achieving money and fame from creative endeavors long ago. It is some other motivation that keeps me going—a kind of a compulsion—I have to be creative.  Creativity is one of the few things that help me to stay sane.  So I keep this blog as my scrapbook.  I measure my growth, here; and sometimes even my lack of growth.  Nothing I do is quite perfect, my flaws are obvious.  One of the worst drawings I’ve ever posted here is of Molly Malone.  One of my best is of the Hood Hood, I think, from the illustrations I did for the story of “Solomon and the Hood Hood.”  I like the illustrations I did of the Arabs for Mimi’s “Hassan” concept for our ESL work out at the base.  Someone has been making use of them, and that posting, I suspect, is being used by someone to learn about the parts of clothing that the Arabs wear, and that thought makes me happy.

A Student in the Shadows

There, right between noun-verb agreement, prepositions and interjections and other grammar elements lies a little essay, a reflective essay, that would have been seen by no one had I not insisted that I check all the essays in e2020 before students can continue taking topic tests and moving on to new content.  

She, the one who writes it, is thin—too thin; and she is quiet—too quiet.  Her dark hair hangs over her unadorned face and she has a kind invisibility to her that I have known and seen before.  It is a kind of screaming invisibility.  She is shrouded in black mist and shadow somehow.  Her brother is in the adjacent room.  He too, is quiet and has the same invisibility and black mist around him. She mentions him early on in the essay, but here is the part that is haunting me:

He was a 51-year-old man living in his parent's basement with his sister and her two kids. Which was already pretty crowded and just plain wrong. But somehow, my mom thought it would be a good idea. Just a few days after living with him, we saw his true side. A drunk jerk that no one wants to be around, not even his own family. Every night he'd have at least a bottle of vodka mixed with OJ. He was not a happy drunk either. When he'd drink he'd get pissed off about everything! And no one would ever say or do anything about it so he was use to pushing everyone around. Which made our relationship all the worst. I could not take someone yelling at me calling me a "Bit**" for no apparent reason…

I have seen essays about worse situations that this, but today, I cannot help but stop and reflect on this one.  I sense it only scratches the surface of the pain.  I have the impression that her childhood has been a hell that is hard to imagine.  I look around the lab and see all the students silently working away and wonder how many of them live in similar desperation and pain.  A school like this one, I think, must be a relief to them.  They plug their headphones in to the computer, face the screen and work away.  No teacher stands yapping at them all day long, no parents to shout abusive things at them.  If they need help they sign-up for a teacher and one of us comes around.  They can see as much or as little of us as they like or need.  It is peaceful for them, really.  Sitting, tuning out the world like that is a kind of luxurious isolation—and being isolated like that  in a computer lab, safe at school, is better than being in an over-crowed home with an abusive drunk demeaning you all the time.

She was gone today.  I was just randomly checking to see who needed to take topic tests when I ran across the essay.  The auto-grading scan gave it a “0” without explanation.  The essay needs proof reading and it is written in one long stream of consciousness paragraph; but it was very articulate about the depth of her feeling—something a computer can’t begin to see or understand.  I very much need to talk to her about it.  I need to get a better sense of her need or if there is more that verbal abuse.  I need to see and talk to the school social worker who is not here this after noon—just so she knows and is aware of the needs of this student.

Early Tulips

Everyone I know is a bit freaked out by the weather we've been having. First it was a really mild Winter, and now it is followed by an extremely warm Spring (I capitalize the seasons). In fact, last week it was a lot like Summer. We're all using words we've been hearing forever to describe it, like "climate change" and "global warming" and wondering if we humans have really messed it all up. A lot of my conservative friends are in denial about global warming. They think it's all a liberal conspiracy or something. I’m not sure what liberals are supposed to gain by looking at the evidence and becoming concerned about it. I suspect that industry and the large energy corporations that stand to lose big profits if they have to endure the regulations to restrict the greenhouse gasses they pump into the air has something to do with it. So anyone who believes that there is global warming must be branded a liberal and is probably going to hell.

Hell, I think, must look something like the tar sands development of Alberta. National Geographic referred to this part of Alberta as “the Dark Satanic Mills” A lot of people don’t realize it is a reference to William Blake. I think it was in the poem called “the Chimney Sweep” and was his attempt at describing the polluted skies of England during the Industrial Revolution

But I’m a long way from tulips. Well, global warming or not, I am witnessing yet another fantastic Spring that is nearly a month early. I was very lucky to be off on a sunny Sunday morning. So I took Sammy (my dog, as you may well know if you follow my blog) and we went downtown and took a few pictures of the tulips. In about a month tens of thousands of tourists will descend on Holland, Michigan for Tulip Time and I doubt they will get to see a single tulip! Hey, but I do! I live here! And I get to see them without fighting the crowds!