We had a fun time at the Ozomatli concert this past weekend. It was a busy day of errands and then the night brought great music and dancing. It was crowded and the floor vibrated. Most of the audience was somewhere in their twenties to forties, but there was one Latin couple that caught our eyes. They must have been in their 60s and boy could they dance. The man had the rhythm in his bones and his hips and body moved all night. His wife was a bit more reserved, like me, but she couldn’t help but let the music pull her into motion. They weren’t dancing as a couple, as most everyone moved to the rhythms on their own, with the exception of one young man in front of me who danced with a few ladies. A good vibe the whole night, and I was up way past my bedtime and had a few more drinks than usual, which was still not much.
The following morning we went over to help my significant other’s cousin and her husband help prepare for his godson, Little A’s, (my writing nickname for him) third birthday party. It was a Mickey Mouse themed party, so we helped with decorations: cutting Mickey ears for pin the ear on Mickey and other creative decorations that his cousin had planned. Everything turned out really nice. Her husband cooked yummy treats at the barbeque. While I was working on wrapping red and black plastic silverware in cute red napkins with white dots, I was also playing with Little A. He also wanted to help, so I found ways that he could assist me, whether it was taking the ribbon I had cut and placing it on the table or unraveling the ribbon. We had to keep him preoccupied while his parent’s worked on decorating his downstairs playroom without him seeing it.
He wanted to go in there, but then he settled into the family room with me, until he decided that he needed tools. I heard him asking his parents if he could go downstairs to get his tools. They told him now was not a good time and I could hear that he started getting frustrated and his father had told me about an hour back that Little A. was responsive to me, so I instinctively went in the kitchen with a plastic fork and knife in hand and said, “Little A., I think we can use these as tools, look, I think these will work,” and I started to walk toward the other room, while his parents said, “That’s a good idea.” And Little A. seemed to think so too, so we were back to working on decorations and “playing.”
Time went by really fast and we needed every minute of the four hours it took for everyone to get everything in order before the guests would arrive. When Little A. saw his playroom, he was so excited that he let out a scream and was jumping up and down. Mickey Mouse images were everywhere and balloons and presents—all nicely laid out and organized.
In late November I finished the last of the Harry Potter books. I had stopped at a certain point in the last book. I cried at what Harry learned in his final view into the Pensieve and the question that loomed in my mind about this particular professor and the greater truth was answered. I didn’t want the story to end, so after I cried, I set the book aside for several days and possibly a week, not ready for the end. I could have easily continued reading, but all good things must come to an end and so it did and now I am happy to have taken that journey, one that I may not have, but for something pulled me in that direction in this year of 2012 in the month of November.
Because of my experience with the Harry Potter books, I knew that my next book(s) would have to be special, to hold some meaning for me even before embarking on their page’s journey. So that brought me to my favorite author, Hermann Hesse. I have begun The Glass Bead Game several times over the long years. I was not ready each of those times. Now, though, I felt more ready than ever and so I began from the beginning again and I’m almost finished. I actually did finish the story itself and am now reading the last part within this fictional biography, the fictional posthumous writings of Joseph Knecht. It’s a story that I am still contemplating. It’s deep and beautiful and I relate in so many ways as far as the questions, self-discovery, inner/outer knowledge, sense of freedom, and inability to name the nameless.
I also restarted a biography of Hermann Hesse, but have put that aside for the time being. I had also been reading Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno over the years, which I finally finished and am ready to move onto The Purgatorio. What brought me back to Dante is a book that popped into my memory that I had learned about from a schoolmate at least six or seven years ago. The book is called Dante’s Path: A Practical Approach to Achieving Inner Wisdom by Bonney Gulino Schaub, R.N. and Richard Schaub, Ph.D. I’m about halfway through this book and appreciate how the authors shed light on Dante’s works from a practical healing perspective. I am enjoying and benefiting from this book.
I tuned into a lecture series on the iTunesU about death. The course explores death from a philosophical perspective. I listened to the introductory lecture and found the instructor to be quite entertaining. I tried to listen to the second lecture one evening in bed—bad idea. Not only did I fall asleep, but also I was in an awkward position and made a strange breathing noise as thought I was chocking that made my significant other come in and ask if I was alright. I heard the noise I made and it had actually woken me. I looked up and the lecture had stopped. I haven’t listened since, but hope that I can find a pocket of time to tune in because I have always had a fascination with death and was happy to see a course on it—from a purely philosophical perspective.
Along the lines of death…I have also come back to José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions. I picked it up at the library about a year ago or maybe it wasn’t even that long. In any case, I didn’t get a chance to finish it at the time, and the premise caught my imagination: What exactly would happen if everyone stopped dying one day? This is my first José Saramago book and I don’t know if his writing style is the same with regard to punctuation in this book as in his others, but I’ve had to just move ahead and not worry about the fact that there are no quotation marks for dialogue; that there are many many commas and not enough periods for my taste; and I don’t think I’ve spied any semicolons. I’ve found that I have to flow through the words in a way that I’m not used to when reading a novel.
A book that I started several weeks ago, before I started reading the Harry Potters, is The Writing Class: A Novel by Jincy Willet. I thought it sounded fun and it was, but I couldn’t get back into it after HP. It’s a murder mystery. I did enjoy it while I was reading it, so I hope to finish it, since I’m so close.
Another fun book that I found on the new shelves of the library is The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes: Harnessing Our Power to Change the World by Deepak Chopra with Gotham Chopra. I need to get back to this one. It’s always interesting to hear what Chopra is up to in his books.
And so, I am back to dipping in and out of books, and at the same time trying to find one larger work that will hold my attention and pull me through, while also finding others and others finding me, as usual.
I hope that today is a Tasty Tuesday and I do mean that both literally and figuratively.
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