“License and registration please.”

“Here’s my license but my registration is in the back.”

“Why?”

“It’s with the manual and … .”

“You know why I stopped you?”

“I do.”

“You roared away from the light.”

“I know. I spent the morning at Sweet Bites drinking coffee and I have to pee. For emphasis I grabbed my crotch. “I know it’s a lousy excuse.”

“You might say it’s a piss poor excuse.”

“You might.”

“Adam told to write about the Ice Hotel and dipping into the frozen river with Marianne. He thinks I can develop a story that follows on one I’d already written about cold water swimming in Maine. Start there, weave into it last year’s obsession with White Pond, add a dash — am I mixing my metaphors? — of Québec City and voilà! the blog lives again.  But I can’t because it’s so all about me. Mainecourse is full of what I see as  my woe-is-me will I ever find happiness sob-stories. How do I write about stuff I’m doing without it being about stuff I’m doing?”

KO: “Write it in the third person.”

“You always say that. The third and I’m still me, I’d have to write in the  sixth or seventh person.”

KO: “Breathe, Michael, breathe. First those stories aren’t as self centered as you think. Secondly, the third person gives you more freedom to play. You’ll have less obligation to stick to the truth.”

“Not that I do anyway.”

KO: “Not that you do anyway.”

Time passes and no new stories magically appear on this here blog so  Adam offers less work: “Post a bowling photo and link it to the bowling movie — how  hard does it have to be … ? Or do you fear the slippery slope of re-immersion & expectation … ?”

Bowling? Yeah, bowling. Compare our passion with Ralph Kramden’s and the “Hurricanes.”  Maybe begin with Ralph yelling at Alice, “Hurry up with the eats, I’m going bowling,”  because often at our table it’s something like, “Why’d we start dinner so late we’ve got to get bowling.”

“Pick an Oak,” was a toe dipper. Water’s warm.  This next one could be a dive off Caroline’s pier, and if so, then I’d hope to have more than voyeurs. Here goes.

*****************************

In the depths of last summer’s humdrum,  Matthew and friends chose Wednesday nights to meet at the “Drome,” the local candlepin (small bocce-like balls) alley down the street across from K-Mart and the only McDonalds in America to have gagged on its own grease and gone belly up.   Why Wednesday? 1960s prices: A dollar a string and two bucks for a beer. Some nights Matt and his crowd commandeered multiple lanes, and he’d return home with stories of his high scores and near fistfights. I remembered my early competitive days bowling against my roommate, Jim McMahon, and later taking Matt and the foster kids to what was then called, “The Bowladrome.”

But this latest entry is not going to be  about Candlepins and little balls, this one, or the upcoming one which I hope materializes, is about big balls, chainsaws, and ice.

*****************************

“Hey, Matt, I need an editor. Your mom’s gone and I have to have someone tell me I’m not embarrassing myself before I embarrass myself. I’d like to keep it in the family and you’re a writer.  Will you read my latest attempt to get the blog rolling?”

“Sure, I’d like that.”

(Thought bubble : You’d like that?  What, no, “Is this punishment for living in the same house with you?”)

Matt reads this while I burn an omelet with cheese, veggies and beans.  I hear a snort and a laugh which I take as good signs. Then he looks up from his computer, “I like the way you say you’re going to write something and then you don’t.”

“Or that I act like I’m going to write about bowling but don’t? Or is it more like saying I’ll finish a job like the bathroom and then don’t?”

“ And, I’d take out the pick-an-oak sentence.”

“You mean I can’t publicly pressure people to help out here like they did in the  old days?”

Matt’s back is to me as I enter the kitchen. He’s emptying the dishwasher and the sounds of our odd collection of plates banging into one another partly masks my entry from the hallway.

“Hey Matt”

He jumps but not high enough.

“WHAT,” he answers

“Marianne is taking me to a puppet show tonight in Boston.”

“Why not drive into a tree right now?”

“No, no. It’s an adult puppet show presented by socialists and anarchists.”

“Pick an oak.”

for Betty Lou Kibbe, nee Kidwell, 20 July, 1929 to 16 October, 2009

As I flew west towards Omaha with my wife on 15 October, my brother and I still had a mother. Only a little over a day later, we wouldn’t; in fact, within 5 hours of landing we’d lose all of her but the waning rhythm of breath and pulse as she slipped into a coma that evening, lingering for about 21 hours before her improbably able heart finally failed. It is perhaps too melodramatic to say it was broken after the death of her husband of almost 50 years just over 4 months ago; but perhaps not.

There was little left of the woman who’d raised us when I walked into her room and kissed her forehead hello at the rehab center where she’d been on and off since falling 6 weeks before. But she was alert and fully there, and we shared an afternoon of voluble companionship before our role shifted to sitting vigil and talking in unnecessarily hushed tones as she ebbed. In the days that followed her death, two brothers who see rather less of each other than many would reminisce and go through pictures and work on rebuilding our image of our mother. Like putting flesh back on her by-then sub-80-pound frame, we set about redefining the twinkle in her eye and putting a spring back in her imagined step.

More in images and less in prose than for my father, here are snippets of her expansive life.

Born in Saint Louis in the Great Depression, upper-middle of six siblings (4 still living), she posed for this picture at age 2 before the family headed for some possibilities in California, ultimately resettling for good back in Saint Louis.

A slight but natural beauty, she had a career at Purina as a nationally-noted feed microscopist, which is an optically-armed industrial spy of sorts, divining the makeup of competitors’ feeds, mostly from gross examination by microscope (in those days before mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs).

While taking one of her sisters to visit that sister’s boyfriend in a mining operation in Colorado in 1957, she was fixed up by said boyfriend with his friend, the temporarily wayward engineer-to-be Jack Kibbe, and they were married the day after Christmas in 1959, seen dancing here at their reception in the house of her sister Peggy and husband John.

Family legend has my father off on a compulsory engineering-school graduation fishing trip when I was born — my mother caught a cab to the hospital when her waters broke, and I narrowly missed being born in the back seat. Jack had taken a job in the iron ore industry in Venezuela, went on ahead after I was born, and Betty traveled unaccompanied to Venezuela with 5-month-old me to join him there. She later bore a second son, Douglas, and raised her two boys in an expatriate community of Americans given to the living-large lifestyle of the 60’s; easily recognizable to their stateside counterparts but with the exotic tinge of the latin locale, forging a new city in a fledgling country of boundless natural beauty.

While in Venezuela Betty traveled extensively about the country with us, including on Jeep expeditions into the mostly-uncharted Gran Sabana jungles. She learned to golf, and even learned to fly, piloting a single engine, low-wing Piper Cherokee my parents co-owned with another couple. Here she’s on the Auyan Tepuy above Angel Falls with her mother, and more or less cheerfully enduring the ritual ablution in used engine oil after soloing in the Cessna behind her.

After leaving Venezuela (the second time and for good), they settled in Albuquerque, where their second house was nestled in the scenic foothills of the Sandia mountains.

From there they traveled to many places, including here for Tricia’s & my wedding

and Fiji, amongst many other fascinating and remote places (she and my dad are to the far right).

This last was taken shortly after my dad died as we were cleaning out their house for sale. We’d gotten her the roses, which here, I guess, served as a sort of stand-in for my dad in this family photo (that’s Suzanne with Charlie and Doug with Sam). She bravely left that house and the life they’d known and went to live in Omaha with Doug & Suzanne, but her roots were done growing and she never settled in. Near the end she told us to make sure to enjoy life.

We are who she raised us to be. We dearly love and miss you – ‘bye, Mom …

for Betty Lou Kibbe, nee Kidwell, 20 July, 1929 to 16 October, 2009

As I flew west towards Omaha with my wife on 15 October, my brother and I still had a mother. Only a little over a day later, we wouldn’t; in fact, within 5 hours of landing we’d lose all of her but the waning rhythm of breath and pulse as she slipped into a coma that evening, lingering for about 21 hours before her improbably able heart finally failed. It is perhaps too melodramatic to say it was broken after the death of her husband of almost 50 years just over 4 months ago; but perhaps not.

There was little left of the woman who’d raised us when I walked into her room and kissed her forehead hello at the rehab center where she’d been on and off since falling 6 weeks before. But she was alert and fully there, and we shared an afternoon of voluble companionship before our role shifted to sitting vigil and talking in unnecessarily hushed tones as she ebbed. In the days that followed her death, two brothers who see rather less of each other than many would reminisce and go through pictures and work on rebuilding our image of our mother. Like putting flesh back on her by-then sub-80-pound frame, we set about redefining the twinkle in her eye and putting a spring back in her imagined step.

More in images and less in prose than for my father, here are snippets of her expansive life.

Born in Saint Louis in the Great Depression, upper-middle of six siblings (4 still living), she posed for this picture at age 2 before the family headed for some possibilities in California, ultimately resettling for good back in Saint Louis.

A slight but natural beauty, she had a career at Purina as a nationally-noted feed microscopist, which is an optically-armed industrial spy of sorts, divining the makeup of competitors’ feeds, mostly from gross examination by microscope (in those days before mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs).

While taking one of her sisters to visit that sister’s boyfriend in a mining operation in Colorado in 1957, she was fixed up by said boyfriend with his friend, the temporarily wayward engineer-to-be Jack Kibbe, and they were married the day after Christmas in 1959, seen dancing here at their reception in the house of her sister Peggy and husband John.

Family legend has my father off on a compulsory engineering-school graduation fishing trip when I was born — my mother caught a cab to the hospital when her waters broke, and I narrowly missed being born in the back seat. Jack had taken a job in the iron ore industry in Venezuela, went on ahead after I was born, and Betty traveled unaccompanied to Venezuela with 5-month-old me to join him there. She later bore a second son, Douglas, and raised her two boys in an expatriate community of Americans given to the living-large lifestyle of the 60’s; easily recognizable to their stateside counterparts but with the exotic tinge of the latin locale, forging a new city in a fledgling country of boundless natural beauty.

While in Venezuela Betty traveled extensively about the country with us, including on Jeep expeditions into the mostly-uncharted Gran Sabana jungles. She learned to golf, and even learned to fly, piloting a single engine, low-wing Piper Cherokee my parents co-owned with another couple. Here she’s on the Auyan Tepuy above Angel Falls with her mother, and more or less cheerfully enduring the ritual ablution in used engine oil after soloing in the Cessna behind her.

After leaving Venezuela (the second time and for good), they settled in Albuquerque, where their second house was nestled in the scenic foothills of the Sandia mountains.

From there they traveled to many places, including here for Tricia’s & my wedding

and Fiji, amongst many other fascinating and remote places (she and my dad are to the far right).

This last was taken shortly after my dad died as we were cleaning out their house for sale. We’d gotten her the roses, which here, I guess, served as a sort of stand-in for my dad in this family photo (that’s Suzanne with Charlie and Doug with Sam). She bravely left that house and the life they’d known and went to live in Omaha with Doug & Suzanne, but her roots were done growing and she never settled in. Near the end she told us to make sure to enjoy life.

We are who she raised us to be. We dearly love and miss you – ‘bye, Mom …

Lew’s photos from our night at the Acton Jazz Cafe.

username: Mark
password :Blofish

La Chica couldn’t fit all her stuff on the plane when she headed back to college after her semester in Mexico, so we were supposed to pack up a few last items.  And then I recalled her saying that she can’t get “good” chocolate on campus.  So I thought I’d stick some in the mailing tube with the posters.  I had the posters all packed, prepared myself with a plastic zipper-type bag and stopped for the chocolate on the way to the post office. The chocolate bars did not fit in the mailing tube, so I tried to crack them down the middle, but then they didn’t fit in the baggie.  (Yeah, I only brought one with me.)  So I broke the bars up even more, stuffed it all in, threw away the wrappers, and sent it off 2-day delivery.  And didn’t hear all week.  So I asked if she’d opened the tube before leaving it on the heater for the week and her answer still makes me laugh: 

I can’t believe I didn’t call and say thank you!  It was actually way funny — I got the poster roll and was sitting on my bed, and S-A [roommate] was on hers, and I open it and I go “Hmm.  This smells kind of funny…”  And I keep sniffing it.  And S-A is like “Well, what’s it smell like?”  And I sniff again and say “Hm.  Stale chocolate…”  And I’m thinking to myself “Now, did Mom package this while she was in the cupboard, or what?!”  And S-A goes “Well, is there chocolate in it?”  Which just wasn’t a thought which had crossed my mind.  And so then I turn over the tube and out falls some chocolate.  

I gather it didn’t wreck the posters, and she did enjoy eating it.  So that’s good.  

Jennifer

 

Last night our neighbors joined us for dinner. Mom was busy drinking Spanish wine leftover  from the previous night’s guest but here she is last March.

Dark rings, bright rings, bright limb of Saturn, the Pale Blue Dot — a planetary spectacular.

– rakkity