Things Consumed

 
We are currently in a state of mourning here in my household. My partner's mother, who lived under this roof with us, passed away unexpectedly last Sunday. His mother was a remarkable woman, who singlehandedly raised her six children under adverse circumstances.

My partner ("S."), once he got over the shock, immediately displayed the rampant creativity that I admire him for. He found his mother's favorite portrait, a photograph that he had touched up, to display at her memorial service. He used it to print up a sort of prayer card, which is often a sort of souvenir covered with angels: his is a photograph of his mother, with an excerpt from a hymn about happiness within the home, which is what she managed to provide her loving children. He spent much of the afternoon selecting her favorite songs for me to burn onto CDs to play before the service or at a gathering afterward, and will get up early in the morning to purchase flowers to make his own arrangements. He's found a song to perform at the service, along with a violin accompaniment. And he'll perform a reading from a children's book about death that his mother selected with that purpose, and which he'll deliver fabulously.

It's both impressive and inspiring, his skill.

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Another memorial in a VERY different context is the beautiful Temple of Joy memorial at the annual Burning Man art festival. It's a building made of dinosaur jigsaw puzzle pieces, dedicated to writing notes to lost loved ones. It was quite a work of art.

I haven't known much about Burning Man, aside from that it's where people can go to display sculture, run around naked, and set things on fire. But my favorite on-line columnist/editor has written some very elaborate descriptions of the event and ritual, which make me realize it is exactly what I think it is, but much better and much worse.

(See Deanne Fitzmaurice's Burning Man photo gallery here to get your thousand words' worth.)

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Seeing rampant creativity among the nudists and arsonists makes me feel so... Boring. It's not that I'm not engaging in some creative pasttimes regularly, but it seems like I could be completely immersed in them if I better applied myself. Although I have often announced that life is a costume drama, I'm struggling (and flailing) to design my sea monster costume for Halloween, which is a pretty trivial challenge relative to building pseudo-Balinese-style temples in the desert.

(So, I have the green, quilted, foam carpet underlayment. But I need to decide exactly how many tentacles I should have, whether or not staples will be sufficiently structural to hold the heavy material together, and whether or not I could stand to wear a Dick Cheney mask all evening. These are such petty concerns, which make me think that office work really has made me a duller girl than I like to believe I'm capable of being.) (IF any of you have made costumes out of carpet underlayment before, or have tips on realistic looking seaweed that does not smell or attract flies like the real thing, or have tips on how I can ride my bike in such a costume, please do write.)

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Memorials and vigils were much on the American public's mind this week. While I'm not one for buying strange souvenirs to commemorate tragedies, I am impressed by a book that recently came out: The Women At Ground Zero: stories of courage and compassion. After reading a brief quote from an operating engineer who had offered her services at Ground Zero for free, only to be turned away with other female volunteers by the men in charge solely on the basis of gender (my god, she was offering ENGINEERING SERVICES, the use of her professional skills to identify the hazards to rescue workers!! I mean, @#$%^&!), and after hearing so many comments about the "brotherhood" of men who gave their lives as rescue workers (to the exclusion of their female colleagues who also rushed in and died), AND about how this tragedy has brought masculinity back into the celebrated limelight for good, it's wonderful to see brave women getting their due and overdue credit for jobs well done.

posted by Arlene (Beth)9:05 PM