It was a long wait between my aunt’s death and her funeral, a month or so of delay while distant family could arrange their travel. All of us grieving in a limbo state, not able to reach all the stages of the process. But the death had also happened years earlier, by degrees, as we lost her to dementia over the last decade. At the funeral mass the priest talked about death as reunion, and especially in the Easter season, a promise of going home. She’d been traveling a long time alone by the time we had to say our final farewell.
I traveled back to Atlanta late last week, my one-time home I’ve been back to a hundred times, and from there up north to the small town where I was born and grew up – where my grandparents are buried, and where my parents will be also, on some day I’ll meet in the future. And all through the weekend, surrounded by family, I’m thinking about my new home, my heart in New York City, future family. Finding home in several places is a funny feeling. There’s the idea that you carry loved ones with you when they pass on, all those good memories. You carry the grief and the hurt, too, but you grow new happiness around those feelings. I suppose it can be the same for the places you’ve lived and leave.
I said goodbye to my aunt at the gravesite, and “hello again – long time, no see” to my grandparents in the plot a few feet over, and then goodbye to my parents and siblings at the airport. Goodbye to one home, and went home again, carrying a bit more with me, committing again to grow new happiness here, to make sure I miss it when I leave.
Art
The Ancient Art Archive has a very cool collection of pictographs, petroglyphs, cave paintings, mounds, etc.. (via Smithsonian)
Iglesia El Rosario in San Salvador looks rad. (via)
Running
Mostly a restful week off, minus a family hike on Saturday. I’m really excited for the runs to come this spring and summer. So many ideas to unleash.
Books
The Iliad. All of these dude are constantly mad. I find myself thinking of The Northman, which is not an amazing movie, but excellent in how it makes you sit with a character bound up in a foreign-to-us set of values. (Eggers did the same with The Witch). Another honor culture leaving wreckage in its wake.
Music
Last week’s Beyoncé helped me learn about Linda Martell, who had only one big album, Color Me Country. Her rendition of “San Francisco Is a Lonely Town” is great.
I stumbled on an article about underrated Aretha Franklin albums from the 1970’s. If I had to choose, it would be Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), on the basis of the multiple moods in the the title track, the wisftful ballad “Angel” and its powerful follow-up, “Sister From Texas“. On that last one, when the band climaxes at “But I’m in there fighting everyday / because I got a few more dreams in me”, the delivery makes for a perfect pump-up/run-through-a-wall moment.
Caroline Polacheck’s, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, I especially like the flamenco-EDM in “Sunset“. So fun to have a moment like when I heard “Butterfly Net“: really liked it, went back to look up what’s playing, and realizing she’s singing with another artist I like. Validating.
Articles & Episodes & Twoots
From the Iliad, mapping the catalog of the ships.
On close.city, you can travel times to supermarkets, transit, libraries, parks, playgrounds, and more, down to the block level.
“Though he’d originally figured he’d go to college, the route began to feel less appealing during the pandemic, when he watched his parents—both tech workers—gaze at their computers all day and realized he didn’t like the idea of spending his life seated before a screen.” The kids are alright!
How colleges turned pink. “There are now 2.4 million more female than male undergraduates on U.S. campuses (8.9 million women compared to 6.5 million men).”
TV
X-Files, s2e5 “Duane Barry“. Intense. And we got another “To be continued”!
Reacher, s2e7-8. Find myself mulling over the last scene, not sure if they earned it or not. Season one did a better job of explicitly exploring Reacher’s wounded, walls-up solitude. This one is more roundabout but they really put a nice bow on it.
Words of Wisdom
“Kids are wildly ambitious. They have had the experience, over and over, of something being hard and then buckling down for six months and getting good at it.”
Mark Larson 