I had no idea that Columbus was home to an influential scientist in the search for intelligent life. (The comments tied to this story are a scream.) Too bad that this man is leaving, he might have found an acolyte in Declan.
I’ve run SETI at Home on my computers for years. You should too!
Life soundtrack: David Bowie, Hunky Dory, “Life on Mars”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007
Life soundtrack: The Byrds, Greatest Hits, “Mr. Spaceman”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007
Its been a week since the final night that Little Brother’s was open. Dan and a few other folks have been busy clearing out the place, which has to be vacated by this weekend. They’ve been organizing a yard sale and silent auction, which has me wondering which things we should keep for Declan‘s teenage bedroom wall.
Those last couple of days were amazing, though. The outpouring of support and thanks for Dan was unbelievable. I posted many of the memories we’ve received through email all over the bar, and people wrote more in a couple of books my mom bought for the occasion, even wrote new ones on bar napkins and stuck them to the wall.
Despite some trickiness surrounding the fireworks, Dan had a great, cathartic set with his band the Wahoos, and Declan helped provide the finale. At the end of their cover of “The Weight” by the band, Declan and I walked in the side door and I put him up on the stage. When the band started playing exit music, Declan started dancing toward his dad, and Dan danced back, finally scooping him up in a hug as the crowd went nuts. That was all it took for Dec to be sold on a brief career in entertainment; he went back out on the stage in front of the crowd several times and danced while people cheered for him. The band started an encore and Declan became more and more distraught as he tried to get Dan’s attention, finally flinging himself back into my arms so I could take him back outside. It took him no time to recompose himself and ask, “more dancing?” But the set was officially over.
Old friends Ned and Roddy Wreckman played a wonderful, fun set that I could hear wafting outside as I settled Declan to sleep in the car, waiting out the Red White and Boom traffic. But the last act didn’t show up and gave no warning that they would bail, so none of the dozens of local musicians in the crowd really had time to work up something to fill the gap. It was disappointing, but a little fitting. The last hour or so that the club was open, the stage was empty. It’s just a reminder that as nourishing and invigorating as music can be, it can also breed dysfunction and a kind of selfishness that most of us, as fans, forgive easily. Dan forgives pretty easily too (many would say too easily for a businessman)
The next day, the Doo Dah’s Unband gathered at Little Brother’s for the last time. Dan walked alongside a coffin scrawled with “Little Brother’s R.I.P.” pounding on a drum inside and carrying a wooden musical note. About halfway through, Declan and I joined him. Lots of people yelled “thank you Dan!” from the street side. Periodically, the Unband would stop and Dan would die in the middle of the road, a group of women keening around him until he was resurrected (they took this so seriously it was hysterical – pictured on the right). At one point, I asked Declan to give his daddy the black musical note before they pulled the shroud over him. Just when it seemed he wasn’t going to do it, he walked over and handed it to him, but damn it all, I couldn’t get my digital camera to shoot quickly enough to catch that moment.
All in all, these were a really happy couple of days, with Dan feeling like Tom Sawyer – a pirate at his own funeral. When people asked how he was, the standard answer was “great today, ask me in a about a week.”
I’ve been through more than my fair share of job losses, including at least one that I had my sense of personal identity all wrapped up in, but that was a breath, compared to Dan’s almost 20 years. I am hopeful that the better part of his history will help him find something else to do that allows him to be himself.
It certainly was surreal on Saturday night as we drove past Downtown and saw all of the traffic on the cap over 670, briefly wondering about the size of the crowd at the club, then remembering that there wasn’t one.
Life soundtrack: Freedy Johnson, Can You Fly, “Tearing Down This Place”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007
…both good and bad, but it’s just been too wild of a week to find the time to say it. It’s been a week of extraordinary highs and lows.
Aaron Beck wrote a really nice commentary in the Dispatch on the 4th, but it spent most of the week in error-land, so I couldn’t post it sooner:
Little Brother’s Won’t Soon Be Forgotten
There is also a slideshow.
Life soundtrack: Peggy Lee, The Best of Miss Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007
Here’s a story about Little Brother’s closing.
Here’s another.
Life soundtrack:
Lyle Lovett, Lyle Lovett, “Closing Time”
Rod Stewart, Smiler, “Farewell”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007
Dan spent yesterday afternoon at the club, the front door propped open so that people could come in and buy t-shirts or old posters he had on sale. It was kind of a depressing day, with people mostly coming in to gawk, take pictures, or, to his amazement, say “you mean you’re really closing?”
He came home deflated that he hasn’t saved more memorabilia over the years, and that business has been so lousy in this final month. This all happened so quickly, it was impossible to create any real finale for the place. People might have stayed away for fear of getting trapped in the crowds, so there weren’t many crowds. Or they never believed it was really going to happen, thanks to the dubious reporting of The Other Paper, where the only real coverage was the speculation that Dan was bluffing or that the landlord was going to have a change of heart. (Never, I repeat never, trust TOP‘s “facts.”)
Fortunately, I read Space.com almost every day. So yesterday, I found out that last night’s full moon would appear to be the biggest of 2007. Venus and Saturn are also hanging out together in the western sky.
So, here on the realio, trulio (props to Ogden Nash) last weekend of Little Brother’s, we loaded our son in the car at sunset on Saturday night and drove to the country. The sky was electric pink and an old, unmarked mix tape of mine that I unearthed in the club’s basement played Neil Young’s “Long May You Run.” Venus was bright, with the faint Saturn nearby, and fireworks were going off all over the countryside west of town. When the moon peeked over the horizon, it did indeed appear to be huge, streaked with hazy red and orange stripes.
“Is it Jupiter, daddy?” Declan asked.
This is the planet that Dec is both the most fascinated with and the most afraid of. After watching a few specials about it, I must admit that I’m a little scared of Jupiter too.
Life soundtrack: Neil Young with Stephen Stills, Decade, “Long May You Run”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007
All weekend long at Comfest, this arch of rainbow balloons tormented Declan. The allure of the rainbow seduced him across crowds. It would catch his eye and off he’d run. Held down by two supposedly empty helium canisters, it was treacherous to toddler parents who knew that looking at the spectrum really wasn’t enough for little ones. They want to stand beneath it, to touch it if at all possible, and you’d just have to hope that you caught them before they pulled on the ribbon that held it all together and rolled the metal canisters right over their feet.
On Sunday night, the arch was attached on one end and sagging lower to the ground on the other. Declan ran in circles beneath the limp side and Dan brought it down to him. Soon, an entire gaggle of toddlers was running directly underneath the rainbow, or wedging themselves into sections where everything in their world became blue, or in Declan’s case, orange (pictured above). The laughter was infectious and constant – the most contagious display of unabashed child–ness I have ever seen.
But for some reason – I think maybe an older kid down the row started popping some of the balloons – the woman who had blistered her hands making the arch came up the row, upset and yelling “Let it go! This mine, get off of it now!” to, well, a lot of people who were under five years old. Even though there was less than an hour or two of daylight left in the festival, and the helium arch was flagging, she scolded Dan to let the balloons go, claiming he was preventing all of the other children from enjoying it.
This is the place where parents and people without kids often part ways. I know that before I had Declan, there were certainly times when I would have been on that woman’s side of the divide and wondered what in the hell we, as parents of wild, balloon-crazed giggle monsters were thinking. I know that I’ve put shiny objects in front of more than one little person in my time and wondered why there seemed to be no way to get them to leave it alone. If I’d put in the work that she did, I also might be too attached to watch my work destroyed, even though the arch’s death was clearly inevitable.
When a little child is one of the people you are closest to in life, and you accept their essence – their ability to sustain a state of joy – you know that there is absolutely no way that simply looking at an arch of balloons can compare to the unadulterated bliss those children had when they could run beneath, around and over them – how often do you get to touch an actual rainbow? Regaining a closeness to that simplicity is one of the most precious things about parenting a toddler, and you can often see a nostalgia for it on the faces of parents who have been there.
So I’m grateful to the woman who made the arch, I just wish that she had been able to experience some of that joy along with us.
Life soundtrack: Willie Nelson, Rainbow Connection, “Rainbow Connection:
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
More to come…Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
I’m finally happy with the name of my blog!
Here are some of the tiny mantras that currently rule my world:
“Galaxies fade away, all stars merge.”
“Just the right speed! Just the right angle!”
“Mommy! Daddy! Baby! Arrow!”
“Saturn has rings.”
“Jupiter’s going ’round the spot’s going round Jupiter’s going round the spot, Jupiter.”
The last one is a pretty apt description of Jupiter’s atmosphere, as I understand it. It also reminds me of my favorite Lewis Carroll quote: “Be what you would seem to be – or, if you’d like it put more simply – never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
Happy Comfest.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007.
It was a recipe for chaos: the Little Brother’s 10-year anniversary and Declan’s 2-year birthday fell on the same weekend. The class that Dan is taking at OSU had a field trip planned for the entire day of said birthday and then, of course, the club’s anniversary took on a whole new significance when its closing was announced. It felt like Dec’s birthday was going to get sucked up by everything else in our lives.
Instead, the appearance of old friends and reunited bands at the club really put Dan at greater ease than he’s been at weeks. The whole weekend felt like a vacation. Dec and I spent most of his birthday on our own, taking phone calls from singing relatives, opening the cards and gifts that people had sent to him and enjoying each other’s company. I let him lead the day, happily fulfilling requests like “let’s hug and snuggle” and “read it again, mommy.”
When a packet of glow in the dark planets arrived in a package from my dad, I dutifully put them up in order on Dec’s bedroom wall. Because he’s watched a Science Channel special about the formation of our solar system on the DVR several times, he was able to name every planet after I went through them with him once or twice. Uranus tripped him up a few times, but he’s now an expert who runs into the room yelling “panets!” several times a day, then points at each one expectantly: “Murkee, mommy? Wenus, mommy? Earf, mommy?” And yes, the set does include the recently demoted “Fluto.”
Most of the adults in his life don’t remember learning the planets until well into elementary school, so again, he is blowing our minds.
His Giga (my mom) got him an amazing blue and silver indoor/outdoor spaceship tent and a Moon in My Room. The latter slipped from his hands as my mom and I were putting a play kitchen from Target together that involved approximately 6,231 screws.
“Baby dropped the moon,” he told us.
Everyone tells me that two is a magical age. And it is. We had a little cake with a number two candle when Dan got home. Declan was every bit as excited to pretend to make his daddy dinner in his play kitchen as he was to sit inside his tent and pretend to be launching into space.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007.
