Does it stress you out - something like jumping off the high board into the pool - when you hit publish on a post? Or even a comment?

No. I generally hope that I'm not being obnoxious but otherwise, no. I take a pause to try on various angles on how someone might read it. Sometimes I soften or reshape based on that pause, but it doesn't stress me out. (sips) This tea tastes like shit. This tea tastes like it was brewed inside a hockey skate with hot water from the tap. From a tap that pulls from a well without an iron/manganese/arsenic filtration system. This tea tastes like a roadtrip breakfast in the United States.

What? I don't understand. We have tea in America.

No you don't.

Yes we do.

No you don't.

Yes we do.

No you don't but that's okay. You make good movies.

Anyway. Moving along. I don't know that I could do it. Commenting here and there, yes, but the brave blogging world seems like it could be so treacherous. Almost like letting everyone on earth become Penelope - obviously, lacking the skills which make her an editor and most (all?) of us, non-editors.

Readers don't pay to read a blog and so maybe there's less scrutiny. Maybe more. I don't know. With the exception of friends, readers will quietly slink away with their faces scrinched up like a bad smell if you write poorly (if expression is a priority, which it isn't, always). You'll never even know they were there. They just won't come back. It's very democratic and so far, not treacherous at all.

Does it ever feel like tossing your innards out where the wolves live? Not that, in my reading, many people seem interested in tearing you to bits. I'd like to see them try; you'd make short work of them, backed by an army of fire-breathing.... (she trails off here to tear a pumpkin spice doughnut in half and take a bite)

It's only ever felt that way once because until now, I've never felt any shame. Horror, fear, inadequacy. But never shame. What happened to Liam, despite the insistence of muscle memory, was not my fault. The reasons why I'm eight minutes down the road feels more like a failure. And so writing about it has made me feel like I'm tossing my innards to wolves.

The whole tearing-people-to-bits / army of fire-breathers thing ... anyone who's going to tear anyone to bits on the internet is someone to feel sorry for and besides, I don't ... (the kettle whistles).

(Cathy in Missouri isn't interested. She changes the subject.) What does it feel like in terms of connection - like people "get" you and what you're trying to say?

I don't worry too much about that. I appreciate it when someone seems to appreciate something, but I don't mind if they don't. I just mean.. there's no point speculating.

How does that impact what is written, from your side? What are some of the more prominent upsides and downsides of writing in this way?

It only impacts what I write if I worry too much about it. Any upsides are pretty shallow and any downsides are too. God I'm starving.

(Cathy ate all the honey dips.)

For real, Cathy?

These aren't doughnuts. I had to be sure.

What? I don't understand. We have doughnuts in Canada.

No you don't.

Yes we do.

No you don't.

Yes we do.

No you don't but that's okay. You make good teeny tiny hockey players.

+++

Everyone seems to feel like readers, comments, community is down. Do you ever wonder about keeping up with all this? What keeps you doing it? Do you throw anything off the side - twitter, facebook, subscriptions? Is blogging as we knew it finished? Or do friendships persist and does the world reconfigure itself to focus on those friendships? Is blogging what it was?

It was #13 on the list but Smell Better was next.

I felt a little embarrassed when I realized the hammock was that long ago, and there hasn't really been a proper attempt since. Things that are difficult - things that resist the prospect of effort - are the very ones that need it. Not now. No way. A self-portrait is not derailed by issues of vanity (or not having enough of it). It's derailed by the question of deserving the attention. Not public attention, but the attentiveness of oneself to oneself. A self-portrait is an inherent statement of worth. And when you don't feel worthy because of deed or history or identity, you're sure you don't deserve a blow dry and half an hour in pretty light.

Photographers disregard the claimed unworthiness of the subject because there isn't room for it. There's too much else to consider. Stuff that matters: aperture, shutter speed. When you stink, pretend you don't. Sweep all that subject's bullshit off the table. Disallow anything other than method and math. Straighten a crooked back, be patient, and employ a medium that has no nose. 

1. Finish book.

2. Finish other book.

3. Finish other-other book.

4. Stop weeping.

5. Remember that statistics are weighted very heavily to death and when I die, my last words will not be BUT I NEVER SAW SEASON THREE OF GOSSIP GIR-

6. Stop watching Gossip Girl with my mouth open and that one fly who enters and exits arbitrarily.

7. Be a BodyRockerTM. Open tins of tuna with my abs. Film myself opening a tin of tuna with my abs at sunset, at f2.8, accompanied by acoustic pop. Upload to Vimeo.

8. Kill a mouse from twenty feet away.

9. Kill a second mouse from twenty feet away.

10. Kill a third mouse from twenty feet away.

11. Dispose of bloodied, beaten, faces-twisted-in-agony dead mouse bodies from twenty fe- *

12. $42,000.

13. Smell better.

14. Stand meaningfully in front of the grave of the tortured dead person most likely to impress people who are impressed by creative pilgrimages to visit the graves of tortured dead people. Do something in front of it that demonstrates my wit, intellect, and sensitivity and that can also be captured with my phone. Like kiss the gravestone or lie down in front of the gravestone and make daisychains, you know, looking at the clouds, or leave a note that would make the tortured dead person swear off the internet, like AUTHENTICITY ROCKS or a polaroid of my own witty, intellectual, sensitive feet on grave-grass with STANDING IN MY TRUTH written in Sharpie marker, and it would look awesome on Instagram like #awesome #epicdead #graveswoon #OMG. Maybe, like. I don't know. Van Gogh or Jim Morrison or that Texan lady who deep-fried a cheesecake.

15. State the intention of being less cynical.

16. Call the plumber.

17. Aspire to more.

+++

I downloaded an application onto my cellular telephone and I found it myself and everything. It's called Timer+ and you set it and it goes BONNNNNNNGG at the end of an hour or two hours or four hours and it's the same thing as a Zen Buddhist monk who winds up like a baseball player and hits you square in the forehead with a compassionate cast iron skillet like BONNNNNNNGG and that means it's time to stop whatever you're doing and set another timer for the next thing to do.

+++

The sequel to The Dread Crew is two years overdue or thereabouts. The happenings of the past two years or thereabouts tapped every last creative impulse. Plus, it's the winter. Fat flakes falling slowly and drafts like a blower of freezing air from, apparently, nowhere.** Grey light and everything sopping and hauling wood and hauling wood and hauling wood because I'll be damned if I'm letting that furnace burn any more oil than the milk in my tea. My camera is upstairs eating anti-depressants and marshmallow bananas. Missy is petting it and shaking her head at me whenever I walk into the room. Gossip Girl? Are you for serious? You're watching Gossip Girl and you're weeping and there's that one fly that's entering and exiting your mouth arbitrarily. The camera whimpers and reaches for a gummy worm. Missy exhales with gusto.

I'm close, though, even if it's just close to the next stage, which is Penelope tearing into each paragraph like those dogs that are trained to attack men wearing one of those Dog Attack Suits. I love Penelope.***

I'm at the end.****

+++

Third mug of tea. Tenth, eleventh, and twelfth hunks of birch, maple, birch.

BONNNNNNNGG.

+++

* TO-DO list screeches to an audible halt at this point, needle dragged across a record, tavern doors swinging thwap-thwap-thwap, crickets, tumbleweeds, two chimps, single flower wilting in time-lapse, etc.

** These are the mouse doors, which are less like regular doors and more like the doors at the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or Caesar's Palace and they're gilded and fourteen feet high with hot gay footmen bearing silver plates piled high with two-week-old cheerios and forgotten bags of poppyseeds and fossilized peas.

*** Penelope is my editor. She is skilled with her instruments.

**** In the two days between writing this post and publishing it, I realized that all I had left, for the novel or at least this particular draft of it, was exactly four scenes. So I gave my Zen Buddhist iMonk a stack of cast-iron skillets fifteen feet high and I finished. Penelope is snapping her jaws lustily and I'm not trying to be cute. She's going to come back and say Super-duper. Now remove at least 17,000 words and maybe I'll consider it, or some other somesuch, and then it's one gauntlet bleeding into another and really, truly, wheee. I've got The Claw and my legs are numb from the knees down. I love writing. I am a masochist.

+++

If you had a hot gay footman, and you could ask him to bring you anything on a silver plate, and the silver plate could be unreasonably huge if need be, and if your hot gay footman could carry it on his splayed-out fingertips regardless of hugeness, what would you ask for?

Or: what small, big, everyday, or profound thing would you feel most fantastic to accomplish this very second? What's stopping you?

GUILT-FREE BURGERS: Go Ahead, Say Yes to the Fries!

AU REVOIR TO OFFICE ASS!

TUSH TONER!

OPERATION KILLER BOD BEGINS... NOW!

JUNK THE JIGGLE FOR A BETTER YOU!

FIND A SENSE OF PEACE. A combo of pacifying patchouli and feel-good vanilla and jasmine in Camuto by Camuto, $78!

I flipped through it feeling angrier and angrier, but not for the reasons you might expect. The evil media and the affected woman's identity and legs airbrushed to the point of plastic and all that. For me it's aesthetic. It's the insult that someone, at some point, decided that the best way to appeal and sell to my discontent would be a starburst around the words BOOTY BLASTER! It's the throwaway nature. The words, the paper, the gloss, the tush toning/inner peace stock images. It's all a lie.

Editors backwards-engineer content to make it more compelling and substantial. That's a part of what I do, and so I read stuff and can't help but backwards-engineer it. There's nowhere to go from BOOTY BLASTER. Take out the trick words, the marshmallows, and there's nothing left. Just garbage and chinese ink and nefariousness scented with cherry blossom mist.

It gets worse, worse. So much worse and I'll confess it. The part that makes me want to run through plate glass is that I picked up that magazine in the first place. Why? Because I've got a booty, so to speak, of a dozen varieties, and gosh, well. Shit. I'd like to blast it.

I'm wearing all my feeeelings. Pudgy and bloated and pale and picked to the bone. My pores. The pores! An elasticity I never knew I had is gone. My chest looks like an old-woman chest, you know, the part that shows. Neck and collarbone. It's all ... god. For serious? Wrinkled. It feels different, done. There's no cream for this. Flat. I went out and the beauty I was with was pure tinsel, and I was her nerdy sidekick because she's one of those pure-tinsel types who's so lovely that she doesn't discriminate against nerdy sidekicks. At one point some guy said What was your name again? while peering over my shoulder for tinsel and it made me feel tantrummy and vain and ludicrous.

I am too evolved to mourn the attention of douchebags. I scowled with adverbs.

But then the douchebag yawned without covering his mouth and I could see his tonsils and they were douchebaggy tonsils and I thought You're yawning? YOU'RE YAWNING IN FRONT OF A WAY-EVOLVED WOMAN? and his mind, without him being aware of it, answered like this: I'm not yawning in front of a way-evolved woman. I'm yawning in front of an almost-forty-year-old mom. Your scowl is the scowl of an almost-forty-year-old-mom and it doesn't even register. The sight of you can only be registered by douchebags who are, like, way older than me. Old douchebags. Like how certain sounds can only be registered by dogs and lemurs and stuff. I'm 26. I can't even see you. All I can see are your pores. Your pores are way-evolved.

+++

I am currently aggregating a variety of visual inspirations and salutations for contemplation. This contemplation will take many months, during which I will contemplate intensely. How it might feel to have rippling shoulderblades and hips that swivel all the way around and I bet if I had hips like that I'd be serene and glowy. I'd be tinsel. I'd have a tan that would come from the inside out. My teeth would go TING! like that. TING! I'd be magnetic. I wouldn't have pores. They'd leave me in protest on the sheer strength of my namaste.

+++

Those of us who think of themselves as mindful cooks are the worst. We wrap competence around us like chubby chain mail, insisting that there's nothing else we could do to improve because we (cook from scratch) (don't drink pop) (don't eat fast food) (don't eat ----) (eat lots of ----) and that, with a smug shrug designed to appear calm and collected instead of defeated, ends all avenues. Change is not necessary. We don't buy Pop Tarts and Beep, so our bodies are beyond us.

I don't know what's causing what. What's just years, what's salt, what's the sugar in my tea, the wheat, the lack of water, the cheese, the sloth. A bag of Doritos jumped into my grocery cart last Tuesday but it was a better-intentioned and more rare bag of Doritos than your bag of Doritos. I ate it but I didn't really mean it.

See? I stare at what I see and note what I feel and I feel more deaf and blind than smug.

+++

It's such a cliche to panic post-Christmas and I've never made a New Years' Resolution in my life so don't pin any of that on me. I'm just stating my plan of contemplation. I'm going to think about it. I'm going to grab fistfuls of myself and mutter. I'm going to have flashes of momentary commitment like, I don't know. A whole glass of water. ALL AT ONCE. I'm going to daydream about being stronger. Not hotter, but stronger, and that daydream will be immediately followed by a bagel with butter and cream cheese and two teaspoons of sugar in my tea, and then muttering fistfuls of myself while I pinch at my aging skin.

I care. I don't care. I care. I don't. It's not just calories and booty. It's everything, the coming-apart that we all are, and the feeling better. I might care, but maybe not enough. I'm thinking about it. Are you?

I don't know how to say thank you. It's out there and you had so much to say and remember and it meant so much to hear it. We had a great Christmas and I hope you did too, even if yours made you feel tender somehow, like ours did. I've been thinking of everyone else out there in the middle of change, and on the other side of it, and it's helped. That's got a lot to do with you.

There's cedar essence in the iron kettle and it makes me think of the west. The kids had malteasers and flake bars for breakfast. I lost to video games, whole-heartedly, and now they talk like BOO-BOO-BEEP except when they say I LOVE YOU MOMMY more sweetly than they ever have in their whole entire lives. Justin's tree was pretty and mine was too, and we went back and forth happily in snow, and there's 2012, waiting.

"I love you, mommy. I brought you breakfast. And I brought your robe."

A banana under my chin, my grandfather's 1964 curling sweater draped overtop. I thanked him and he put his feet between my thighs because thighs are warm and feet are footsicles.

"You're so blue this morning, Evan. You're teal and turquoise and proud like a robin's egg. You're all soft and calm and I can see it. You did it."

He smiled at me.

"I did."

It occurs to me that he might have heard me crying last night. Or it drifted upstairs, an emotional contagion.

It won't again.

+++

When two weddings are back-to-back, one Saturday and one Sunday, you get home at eleven or midnight and set up a factory line. Seasoned photographers stay cool. I can't. I won't sleep until I've seen it all, chin in my hand, watching the preview shot after shot. I need to know, despite the lack of recourse, that I got it.

DISK FULL

A few months ago I emptied it, back-to-back, throwing chairs and chests and candlesticks off a beached ship. Stared at the one truly guilty hulk: kateinglis > pictures. This is all on the portable hard drive. Duplicates. It was 2 AM. There'd be another bride the next day, another groom. Snap decision. I deleted it all from my computer, intending to fix it later.

I didn't.

Two days ago the portable hard drive got knocked. It fell and made a horrible CRACK on the floor and it took a few hours for my head to wrap itself around what had happened. That hard drive is the only source of every digital photograph and every video I've ever taken in my life, starting in 2005 with Evan's birth. And Ben's. And Liam's. Seven years. Thousands.

I cried for all that but especially when it struck me, as it does rarely, just how gone Liam is. The kind of gone that's a spectre. Layers unfolding for new and increasingly vivid angles on gone. 26 pictures on Flickr, the few we shared, low-resolution, many of which I can't bear to look at anyway. A clipping of his hair in a two-inch zip-lock bag, and a stamp of his feet and one hand pressed into gold ink after he died. 26 pictures of an unbearable life and that's all I've got.

+++

I was just babbled and dammit, separation and then death. I always apologize. Hello. I'm sorry. It was a long time ago. It wasn't.

+++

I just can't believe it.

+++

I know everyone thinks their data is the most worthy data, the most important data, but I need you to know that my son is on there and that's all I've got and so please. If you don't manage to get it back I'm going to leave a salt stain on your carpet and you'll never get it out.

I smiled in a way that wasn't a smile at all. His face went red.

+++

Yesterday Evan was mad again. He couldn't draw a camel. I CAN'T. He ripped it in half and collapsed on the couch, sobbing.

He's hungry and tired and six, said my brain. I've ruined him, said my other brain, the stupid one.

I stared at him for a while, hesitating. Ignore? Give his head a ruff on the way by and make supper? Tickle? Or talk about it at the risk of making it into A Thing?

I don't like to cultivate Things. I prefer shrugging, head-ruffling, and benign neglect. Either that or a spell.

Baby boy. You know when you're mad or sad or frustrated? When you rip things up or yell at somebody or slam a door or cry? Are you listening to me, Evan? Listen. Look at me. When you feel that way, there's a ball of red energy right there in your chest, under your skin, inside your ribs, on top of your lungs and all stuck up in your throat. It's red, a bad red. It grows and grows and makes you sick and sad. You need to learn how to let all that red go, love. Want to know how? You breathe it out. Breathe it out and see it all start to seep out of your mouth and your nose and your ears and your toes, and it goes up like a cloud and the breeze takes it away. You can see it, if you look the right way. And then here's what you do next. You think, as quick as you can, about the best things. Lego and hockey and macaroni and cheese with hot biscuits and Santa Claus and the skate park quick like 1-2-3-4-5. And then you'll feel something different filling up all that new space. A ball of blue energy. Blueish-green...

Evan interrupted. Turquoise?

Yes. That's the energy ball that cools you down and makes you calm, and it helps things to grow healthy and good. You can make that blue energy ball whenever you like, Evan, as long as you know the trick to it. There are lots of people who don't know the trick to it and they walk around all day long with their red energy ball getting bigger and bigger and then it'll be in there so deep it'll never get out and they won't ever be able to feel that nice cool blue, not ever. They'll just sadder and sadder and sadder until they forget what it feels like to be turquoise on the inside.

He asked me if I was telling the truth. I said yes and meant it.

+++

Google is as comforting as Google is when it diagnoses an infected zit as Lou Gehrig's disease. Severe, irrevocable, damage, maybe. I've got a week to contemplate just how careless I've been. A week to shop for two new hard drives, maybe three, plus an online backup subscription and god knows what else, whether they retrieve our family record or not. Failsafes, from now on.

It's what they say in the world of ropes, knots, and high-angle rescue.

+++

Red to blue. Red to blue. I can do it. So can you.

To have courage is to behave with integrity despite fear and loathing. All I have are the last two.

I've been sitting on this news - and how to convey it - for weeks. I'm only letting it go because I'm tired of dragging around the fear of letting it go.

I still don't understand what courage is. Only a lack of it.

+++

I was driving and crying again and I wondered if there was a way to crash the car so that I'd break both arms and both legs without cracking my back, snapping my neck, or melting my face off. I thought about it deeply. Romantically. A side-collision? Head-on? A tree? A post? Over a guard rail? I wished for a moose, though not a big one. Just enough to break almost everything without either death or eternal diapers. Traction. My whole body in a cast, gauze to cover up all the shame except for that of eyes and lips. If only I could be in traction it might all stop, at least for a while. Who could hate someone in traction?

Shame on her eyes! Shame on her lips!

Shhh. She's not going anywhere. We'll hate her later.

+++

Pulling all the shades down lends a false sense of security but false is better than none. Not that I'm scared. I'm not. Just unsettled. My mind races with everything this house needs: duct cleaning, money, grout, competence. There's no hot water in the upstairs shower. My desk chair rolled out the door and down the hall, downhill. The basement flooded twice. Rusted cans of paint and scrap wood bobbed in knee-deep sludge. The cobwebs hung on. Hundred-year-old rocks had seen it before. A man with a backhoe dug a trench.

Every now and then something scurries across the roof and I stop to listen and it hears me stop to listen and so it stops too. Then a pause. Then it scurries again, then the furnace goes THUNK and I sink into this bed, the one too small for anyone else.

+++

We are separated. We are friends. There's no yelling, no spectacle. There never was. I bring Justin pumpkin cookies and he fixes the filter under my sink. He comes over for waffles, and the four of us sit at a new table. Then he goes home, half the time with the boys and half the time on his own. We both feel strange. We talk about it. Then he looks out the window and says If you're going to stack that wood you'd better do it soon. The best sun will be in the front yard. It'll dry quickest that way. I push a mason jar of lentil hummus into his hands and tell him to drive carefully, and he says thanks, and we both mean it.

We have given Evan and Ben no cause for alarm and so far, they aren't alarmed. That might be just them, though, rather than any proper doing on our part. They are purely themselves. Mommy has STAIRS! but Daddy has TELETOON! and it's just as messy and as ordinary and as safe as it ever was, as long as Teddy Doggy and Teddy Monkey are in the right place at the right time.

It's as good as it could possibly be but I have never failed so profoundly. It's why I've had nothing to say.

+++

If you're a friend and you're finding out this way, I'm sorry. I hid from you. I hid from everyone.

+++

A friend finds me in an unknown grocery store and says What are you doing shopping out this way? and I shrink with shame. But I don't wish for traction. Not anymore. There's a woodstove here and it's always going, and it fills my house up with a healthy scent. The kids have stirred up all the dust, and there are no more floods, and I lie awake sometimes, crying, speculating, listening.

+++

Please don't make this into a thing where we talk about me. Please don't say you're sorry, or congratulate me, or tell me anything to make me feel better. It's not deserved or fair. Please don't forecast doom. That's not deserved or fair either. This isn't ideal. The past couple of years have been the saddest ever. But we both think we can get through it gently, and not just for the kids. For us, too. And so we're shutting out tales, warnings, and declarations of anything less.

If you want to say something, can you tell me about a time when everything fell apart but ended up okay? That's what I need. What we need. Maybe that's what you need too.

That's my niece, Molly. She giggles and every time she does, baby blue bubbles float into the air and then with a soft POP! they burst glitter all around, a cloud of sprinkles and sparkles. She is a little girl, a big girl. She reads all the voices of every character, with inflection. She likes it especially when adults are ridiculous. She cooks and bakes and rides her bike and every time she does, baby blue bubbles filled with sprinkles and sparkles trail along behind her, floating, swirling in the breeze. Can you see them?

I like to think that Jesus would object a little to the oxy-clean bleaching of his mother. I like to think that he'd sit on the floor engrossed in lego, and that while pressing his Luke Skywalker X-Wing Fighter With Power Functions And R2-D2 Figure together, he'd crack the thing down the middle and say Damn. And Evan would look up and say Hey, Jesus. Have a cookie.

The authority of perfection doesn't compel me. The lie of untouched female purity irritates me. Baby blue bubbles filled with sprinkles and sparkles: they are what's holy. They arrive with an imperfect splash.

I want a host of gods, and I want none of them whitewashed. I want one of them to be in charge of bubbles. I want them to be socialists, to look after each other and divide accountability and resources equally. I want a community of magicians to craft the world - all that we see of it and all that we don't - and I want them to spring from a god-mother who counts down from ten, loudly, until the bionicles get picked up OR ELSE.

I remember the last time I laughed the way Molly laughs, but only if I really think long about it. If I asked Molly the last time she laughed like that, she'd laugh like that. Or maybe she'd stare at me, puzzled, like there's no line distinguishing a good laugh between this morning or yesterday or tomorrow.

And deep, deep inside, her soul would shake its head. Oh that poor thing, that cursed grown-up, forgetting how it is to laugh like that just always, daily, always, at the slightest, simplest, most ordinary stuff. Don't you ever lose that, Miss Molly, her soul would whisper, hoping to register like a record played backwards. Don't let the years squash your bubbles. Your bubbles are your purity, dear sweet lovely little big girl. Your bubbles make you holy. Insist upon them.

What do your gods craft and own? Do you forget they're here? How do you remember?

The gingerbread man gets baked and jumps out while everyone cheers and sings about how delicious he is. I knew a guy in university who did that but he wasn't made of gingerbread.

Ben's first theatre production is what it was. If you like what you see, applaud! Lots of clapping. We like lots of clapping. There was lots of clapping.

Afterwards he ate one of those giant floppy pizza slices, half a tray of fruit meant for twenty, two glasses of POP!, a piece of cake, and a gingerbread house. Then he was ushered to a chair to sit for his official post-premiere interview. I watched him.

Go sit over there Ben, says the lady with the big camera. He does. Okay now look this way. He looks. She pins the mic to his sweater. He pulls it off to test it for size and strength because he, like all kids, is a scientist. Hmm. What's this? I've never seen it before. I should totally throw it against that wall to see what it'll do if someone throws it against a wall. Anyway. What? Oh. She pins it on again, and she asks him questions, and he answers with the ease of someone who is only aware of who he is at that exact, precise moment. Well-fed and well-sugared. In the company of multiple grammies and grampas and mommy and daddy and brother. Safely delivered through a play without having fallen off-stage. On his way to go eat a bunch more stuff.

Did you practice a lot?

Yeah!

Did you have fun?

Yeah!

Who did you play?

JOHN DOUGH.

Are you going to come do theatre with us again?

Yeah!

He hops away. One foot, the other.

I realize I'm still watching him, noting something, you know, without knowing consciously what I'm noting. Maybe it's the way that kids don't agonize about who they are, or agonize about looking good, at least not yet. I wonder about the not-yet. When is yet? When do we get all grey and furrowed? Damn shame.

Greeting cards and text art posters get all poetic about how children are our teachers, and I know what they're getting at when they say that. Love and acceptance and it's a small world after all, but I think that's all dancing around the salient point, which is this: the freedom in being a kid is the freedom first from the world news report, and second from the grown-up curse of getting insufferably and constantly meta.

He says yes to everything except, occasionally, pants. He verbalizes delight without words: with squeaks, shrieks, giggles. He always tells the truth. He is not yet aware of the phenomenons of perception (false ones, cruel ones, judgmental ones, delusional ones, all those of other people as well as of himself), expectation, large-scale lies, corruption, psychological baggage, political rage, religious rage, non-random misfortune at the hands of others, and the deception of mass marketing and mass media. The only mass he senses is that of his own thump.

Everything is new, and nothing is sullied. Danger is limited to snarly dogs and crossing the street, and there's the trick. You might say his world is small, and that its safety and contentedness roots there, in smallness, in his child-entitled obliviousness and shelter. But I think maybe it's the opposite. His world is enormous. It's us who shrank.

Meg and Nick were my last bride and groom of the season. I've been nostalgic for the sight of wee little flowergirls ever since. A week before the day I scouted around and remembered my Grampa Joe's yacht club just down the road, the island where he kept his beloved Pygargus. It wasn't always a yacht club. It was a prison island for pirates and that's not any sort of myth. The old jail is still there, used now as a rope loft. The cells, little slits for light, rock beds and iron bars gone quiet now with piles of canvas and cans of epoxy. I loved it in there as a kid. As a photographer, I liked the texture, literal and otherwise. Screw the Public Gardens and those damn swans.

I asked these two if they were up for it and Meg said something like I can go anywhere. I've got boots. When I saw that she meant it, I fell in love a little. Soft grey and cheery yellows, dreamy light, the ocean just there, and kissing, kissing, kissing.

Love to these two, and abundance. They've already got plenty of both.