my momma started something with her eggplant o’lantern the other day…
She came by with a load of odd and bumpy vegetables tonight and M’kehla, Sam and I joined in to create an interesting edible menagerie.
more critters here.
Is a beautiful place. I got back from BM just in time for Sam’s last summer weekend before school, so I swooped him up and we went campin’.
Cap’n Sam commandeered a likely chunk of driftwood..
And lo and behold, the Dread Ship Log sailed the high seas! Tourists quavered before his mighty onslaught.
It was damn windy and cold, so we built a driftwood shelter and that was perfection. When my brave corsair got shivery wet, he came up and dipped out of the wind to lounge about in the nice warm sun, munching on trailbars and humonguous crunchy corn.
There was so much excellent driftwood lying around, we built some mini Goldsworthy Towers(note the pebble citizens escaping across Sam’s evacuation bridge).
The red sandstone cliffs were gorgeous and so carveable I couldn’t resist-we soon had a Sand Wyrm lurking about hungrily.
Luckily for the tasty-looking kids beach-combing nearby, Sam found the perfect driftwood rifle and made short work of the beast.
We celebrated our triumphant beach day with a gigglefest in our tent.
Where we discovered the ‘Cherrypie’ Larabar is much more accurately dubbed the ‘long-chewing sour cherry rectangle’. Truth doesn’t sell well, yo. 
Ah well, we had chocolate chip cookies to resort to, so all’s well that ends well.
‘Twas the day before I left for Burning Man, so the pics fwooshed through my camera so fast I almost forgot about them in all the whirl of returning…
My mom’s booth came out beautifully. The kids(and adults too) loved it!
It was the Arts In Nature Festival at West Seattle’s little green, hidden oasis, Camp Long.
Mom and her band of dragon musicians wandered about making music and handing out dragon riddles to the kids and Sam and I played on the glacier and the climbing rock and visited the cool installations in the cabins. The hurricane cabin was so cool-an auditory installation, hurricane winds and transformers exploding issuing from a cabin in the woods… Awesome!
The kids had a blast at the end of the festival when they took the ginormous world ball off it’s stand and let them roll it around, which soon became a game of tag, pushing it up the grassy meadow slope, letting go and running like hell as it came back down!
Sam probably would have stayed all day pushing the ball around, especially when kids started lying down in it’s path to let it galumph over them on the way down, but we really had to pack up the booth and call it a day.
Shan is dead.
This picture was taken eons ago by a newspaper photographer who did a story on our commune school, Tower School. I’m not sure who’s under the hat in the lower left, but I’m the one above said hat. Aaron(one of my best friends as a kid, not to mention the first boy I ever played pirates with) is next, then Aaron’s little sister Laura, who took my place(thank god!) as smallest, cutest brat around, then my sister Lyca in yet another revolutionary cap. A and L’s mom, Susan is behind Lyca, next to Shan. It’s the only picture I have of him, so I printed a copy out for our Dragonboat, along with a print of the post I wrote a few weeks ago.
My mother Blackbird collected some memorabilia and writings from people who knew him and created a paper dragon boat. We sent it off to sea(well, to lake actually), burning it’s firey memories into the night.
Sam waded out with the little boat as it sailed away, glimmering in the evening twilight. It’s a very shallow part of the lake, so he was able to stand guard over it for quite a long time. He felt quite sad afterwards, so we went to celebrate life and death with some yummy desserts and a silly movie.
A sunny dragon-painting afternoon on my mom’s back patio. Sam and I succumb to an attack of MAD DORKBALL PHOTOSHOOT!!!
Sigh… I’m love my boy-I’m so happy he’s as completely loony as I am.
The man who was the foundation of my world as a child is passing out of this world. Dado Shan(formerly known as Chechoslovakian immigrant, Miroslav Pavich), the guru of the commune I grew up in. He’s 93 and cancer is claiming him, stomach-first.
It all seems so far away, the days when I was a gangly little girl in the woods, listening entranced to his marvelous stories, or bouncing on the wild pony of his knee. He was the self-annointed king of our commune and for a time it seemed a magical and wondrous world. He was the essence of everything brave and true, courageous and genuine. We even swore by his name when we made a solemn, heart-felt promise, it was a Dado’s Honor.
That was before his son died of cancer, bit by bit and we were growing up, out of our wide-eyed hero worship and things began to break and grow dark and twisted.
The cracks widened and the sticky, stinky pieces of the puzzle began to protrude as we(the commune brat pack) grew up enough to challenge the way of things(why was this one man in charge of everything?), to peek into the realms of adulthood(what was going on with our mothers? Why were they so enthralled? Where were our fathers?), to want to venture into the teenagery world(Oooooh, Sting?!)-and that was strictly forbidden. One by one, we left and he got angrier and angrier-warning us of certain destruction(drunken whores on the street, I believe was the doom prophesied us girls) should we not listen and stay with him.
So, here I am with this confusing misty memory of the sweet, loving, wise, Saint Nicholas-like(complete with bushy white beard and mustache) father/grandfather juxtaposed with a paranoid, embittered, often cruel and emotionally abusive tyrant.
And here I am an adult, in a completely different world-the one I’ve created, found, chosen, grown into. A mature(well, ahem, reasonably mature) woman, with a nine year old son, friends, family, lovers, an expressive, juicy, artistic and creative community.
And Shan is dying. What do I do with that?
I don’t hate him. I did for a while, when I was a much younger woman and things were cut of a simpler cloth. I’ve seen and experienced a lot since then and I know that people aren’t evil demons or pure angels. He’s just an old, old man who’s lived a long, long life and done some very good things and some very bad things.
I loved him so much when I was a kid. I still love him, it’s just not an idyllic love anymore. He was a magnificent character, a charming, dynamic, heroic, powerful, generous sweetheart of a man and an absolutely loony, tyrannical, selfish, abusive mess of a human being. I cannot absolve him of the pain he caused me, my sister, my mother, my friends… But I can forgive him.
Dado Shan, may this passing bring you peace. May your spirit be free. May you join the buddhas and bodhisattvas and learn to teach without grasping and twisting and harming beings.
I won’t be there when you die, but I’m thinking of you and I love you.
Thank you for holding me when I was little, for telling me entrancing fireside stories, for walking in the woods with us, for giving my mother a safe place to raise us when she was a hapless young hippie with three children and no place to go. Thank you for the beautiful and terrible childhood that made me who I am.
Farewell,
Zan
My posse and I jostled our way to the beach today, past mobs of pallid Seattle beachgoers, wads of bbq parties, amped up volley-ball players and an entire floofyass wedding to create the longest beach dragon ever!
The kids, Sam, Emilio and Martin, brought buckets of sand and gathered rocks for the scale ridge, until the splashing of the cold waves lured them away…
It was a perfect summer day. Us moms lounged about on the toasty sand, eating frozen blueberries and chips and talking about Burning man and polyamory whilst the kids ran about with shovels and occasionally popped by to grab a chip or slurp a soda.
Bestest sea dragon yet!
My mom and Sam and I got to see a dear friend this week, for the first time since her three year buddhist retreat ended. Elisabeth, now known also as Wangmo, looked absolutely beautiful in her maroon and yellow habit as we showed her some new Seattle features.
The aquarium, with it’s spanking new ’sea wall’ and lovely, mesmerizing jellyfish arch and the Olympic Sculpture Park, with it’s big, rusty(or shiney) abstract objets d’art and lusciously smooth eyeball seats.
It was a monsterously fun day.
Today, I took my horde to the superultrasecret ropeswing hideaway I discovered.
We rocked the forest so loud, passersby on the nearby Burke Gilman began to filter through the mucky forest to investigate. Darn it, I’ll have to boobytrap it better. Maybe a pit trap, or alligators… And, damnit, I plumb forgot to swear everyone to secrecy on the pain of dismemberment-or loss of Strongbad priviledges(a much harsher sentence, with this crowd).
Ah well, I could hardly trust an oath from such a scurvy bunch of pirates, could I?
More pics of our adventure here.
