Art, Sport, and Chicanery

Goodness gracious, the world keeps spinning 'round and our lives just keep pumping out the thrills, like a great, enchanted, inexhaustible pasta machine. Only the pasta is the thrills. You know what I mean.

There's so damned much to get to in this three-headed entry. We shall begin at the beginning:

Art

We brought the kids' sense of aesthetics and culture into attunement by going to see "Horton Hears a Who" Friday night in Bennington. Thumbs up from all, though the adults did squirm a bit at some of the tacked-on conventions in the middle. The wee ones enjoyed it thoroughly, and there is something, I have to say, about the people in Bennington, Vermont. Because not once did anyone cheese me off during the whole of that film. No yakking, no cell phones, no rudeness of any sort, form patrons or staff. Well done, Vermonters. You are, as your license plates proudly proclaim, most definitely "Not New Yorkers".

Here's a piece of art that Q did. It's an oryx, which fascinated both Q and me in a National Geographic special I taped off PBS the other week. The oryx's incredibly long, seemingly exaggeratedly so, horns, which I had always thought must be mostly adornment, since they could so obviously not be effectively used for fighting, turned out, in the video, to be exactly the right length for chasing a lion away once the lion has grabbed the oryx's hindquarters. They shake their heads in a generally backwards direction, and the lion instantly lets go. He cranked this one out from memory just before bed the other day. I love in particular the way its eyes are all the way up at the top of its head, which, if you look at large antelope, is really quite a good observation:



See what I mean:



The following day (I think), Tie turned Q's art over, and, on the other side, blew all our minds with this:



I'd never seen her do anything NEARLY as representational as this. Her figures tended, up to now, to be fairly amorphous blobs with attached blobs for hands and feet, each appended by appropriate numbers of finger-type blobs. But this just blew us away. I wanted a shot of her holding it, and this is what I got:



The concept was somewhat lost on her, I think.

Sport

On Thursday, Q, who is going to play Cal Ripken baseball for the first time this spring, went to the "tryouts", where they see if any of the kids who played on the lowest level ("rookie league") could play in "AAA", where the kids do the pitching. Here's some evidence of that episode - it's not exactly an "action" sequence, but rather more of an "it-seems-very-likely-that-soon-we're-going-to-see-some-action" sequence. But, hey, when you hire a simpleton as your cameraman, that's the sort of thing you're going to get:



The whole business was two hours long, from 5:30 to 7:30, which sliced right across the peak supper hour for pretty much all of us and cut down on the energy level of the parents who were standing around for that entire time, watching our kids have varying amounts of success. Q was pretty much the only kid there who didn't play baseball last year, and even so, he held his own quite well, particularly at the "catch a fly ball and fire it to home plate" station. Very accurate and powerful long-distance thrower. He'd never been coached on grounders, but he still picked it up pretty well, as can be seen here:



Batting was a real problem for him. He can swing a wiffle bat like nobody's business, but had literally never tried to bat with a big, heavy aluminum one before. So that didn't go too well. Hey, if he plays on the rookie league team, he'll be one of many, many seven-year-olds there. He's psyched to give it a go, either way.

In other sporting news, pagans around the globe today celebrated "Easter", a quaint holiday commemorating a magician's return from the land of the dead, symbolizing the rebirth of the flowers and birdies each Spring, with outdoor games of fertility. So we sallied forth to play along this AM, with eggs provided by a very good sport of an Easter bunny, whose husband had spent the previous night boozing it up and playing cards at a birthday party:



Sorry - you were probably expecting a picture of the boozing-it-up. We were very careful not to allow photographers in. Though it was also related to Sport, in that I successfully introduced euchre to the Berkshire Hills. It should now spread like a virus from person to person, infecting them through the euchre pods I left scattered about the room where we played.



It's all going according to plan.

T and Q both proved to be very astute hunters of eggs. Q saw a flash of teal and charged off to the right to corral one, but T followed her instincts to the birch tree, well-known as a preferred haunt of the Easter Bunny. Watch as her eyes, quick and darting like those of a mongoose, seize upon a well-hidden egg:



Later this morning, I continued my sporting day with a vigorous workout achieved by moving the rest of the wood from the pile in the back into the garage, and received a lot of help from T, whose payment was to be allowed to ride in the empty wheelbarrow back to the woodpile after each successful transfer. As she stood there beside the wheelbarrow in the garage, with the light from the open overhead door and from the window lighting each side of her face, I thought it lovely, and had her freeze while I snapped up the camera:



Can you blame me?

Chicanery

We were invited over to Jennifer French's home this afternoon for some Easter cake, and had a very nice visit with Jennifer, her fiancee Paul, and their little Cocker Spaniel, Daphne. Here she is:



OK, that isn't actually Daphne. It's an image I stole (that's right, stole) from a website that advertises dog grooming services. But Daphne looks exactly like that. And she loved our kids, despite the fact that they refused to call her Daphne, and somehow settled on the name "Genevieve". But they romped and hugged and cuddled and called her, and rolled and bounced balls for her, and otherwise squeezed every tail-quiverin' ounce of lovin' they could out of the only friendly dog they've seen for weeks. And at one point, as Genevieve, holding a bright orange ball, darted between them across the doggie bed where both children were kneeling, T' eyes met Q's, and T said, her face aglow with giddy anticipation, "Q, remember? Tonight Mami's going to make a special Easter dinner!" Whereupon they embraced each other tightly, Daphne squirming and writhing in a cuteness seizure between them. There was not a more sacharine sight anywhere to be had on Earth today. It's true, I checked the meter. There were twins in identical pink dresses holding hands and smooching each other with lollypops on a teeter-totter in France; in Latvia, a kitten and an aging hen snoozed atop a grizzled old donkey in the straw at daybreak. But there were no cocker spaniels present in either situation. Genevieve put us over the top.

But it was all a lie. The cake party went so late that the great alliterative Easter dinner, of pork roast and pea pods and potatoes, was postponed until Tuesday. We shamelessly led them down the primrose path and then jerked the doggie bed of our promise out from under their adorable little cocker spaniel embrace.

And this was not the only chicanery of the weekend.

Due to some delicate interpersonal community politics, I'm unable to relate to you here a very juicy and entertaining anecdote regarding a kindness Janneke did for someone we know, and the way in which it transformed our Saturday morning. It could find its way around through the grapevine and wind up offending some people, whom we really don't want to offend. So you'll have to just ask me some time about the budding door-to-door salesmen who were in our house for an hour and a half, trying to get us to plop down $2000 or so for "The Rainbow".

Which, as Q and T will attest, really is a hell of a vacuum cleaner.