This is real; they do exist

Slip Slidin' Away

It's 96 degrees and the air is dripping with humidity. It's so hot the boys are caught in a perpetual slide. They try to deny their ontological reality by closing their eyes and looking away, but we all know better. The image gives it away. It is proof.

But if we've learned anything from Roland Barthes, we've learned that the camera lies. There is no heat, no swimming pool, no slide, and no flowers in the right hand corner of the frame. The only thing there is is the boys. And they are, one way or another, slip slidin' away.

Sleeping in an upright position 

"If you become a bird and fly away from me," said the mother, "I will be a tree that you come home to." 

the making of The Lumberyard 

sick boy #2 

sick boy #1 

Catching Up

The temperature is a mild 95 as I type this entry. I am dressed in nothing but a sweater and slacks. Gareth and Eliot are resting with their mid-summer fevers and Holly is outside spraying poison ivy.

I knew Eliot was sick yesterday when he left his mint chocolate chip ice cream untouched. This morning Gareth came down with the same cold so Holly and I are dressing warm and drinking tea with honey to fight the infection. We'll let you know how it comes out.

Holly continues to deliver babies. She characterizes it this way: "I feel like Herman Melville must have felt when he birthed the great white whale."

The boys go to an exercise class two days a week. They kick balls and run around like children are wont to do. They say it gives them the strength to go on. "It gives us purpose," they say. "It is our strucutural center around which we build meaning."

I teach a composition course five days a week. This requires that I get out of bed in the sixes--something I prefer not to do--and say things to the students for almost two hours every morning. Now and again I recall these things I say, but for the most part it's like a bad classroom dream.

Ken and I are working hard on The Lumberyard, our radio program. We finally have the format down and we're busy putting together the first eight episodes, the first of which will air sometime in September. Stay tuned.

Eliot first big boy bed--before the bunkbeds were stacked.