The Urban Pantheist

When we first got Maggie she was 16 pounds and cute as the dickens. Here she is, 13 years ago tugging on the cord of a non-digital camera.

I shouldn't let it go by without comment. Today is our 10th wedding anniversary. We celebrated by surviving nightmarish commutes in the sloppiest weather of the year. This weekend we will do something more appropriate.

As near as I can tell, this is the first time I appeared in the media (although I do vaguely remember being at some public event and a photog pointing a camera at me when I was younger, but unless you can find it, this one will suffice). I must have noticed the science journalism blunder in the caption (a pond aquarium won't have SALT water) but I didn't remember it until my dad showed me the clipping yesterday.

I take this as proof that I was on path to studying biology before getting discouraged by my shortcomings (disorganization mostly, and inability to keep a notebook) and derailed into art. I've come back to my first love!

I was looking through my Aunt and Uncle's Flickr account when I came across this picture, and realized it was probably my first visit to a zoo. The kids with glasses are my cousins Peter, David, and Joanna; the little blonde boy is my brother Andy. My mother is holding me, it must be in the summer of 1970. The photo is labeled "Thornton Burgess Museum," but I think that's not true: the place called The Thornton Burgess Museum is in Sandwich, Mass., on Cape Cod, where the author and conservationist Thornton Burgess was born. However, he moved to Hampden Mass. later in his life, and the property where he lived was purchased by Mass Audubon. That place was very close to where I grew up, and I seem to remember our family visiting it more than once.
That property is called Laughing Brook, and is a Mass Audubon sanctuary that had a collection of native wildlife up until a decade or so ago. If my memory is correct, Laughing Brook sent some animal ambassadors to a park event that the family went to when I was about 5 or 6, and I got to hold a black rat snake. That experience never left me, and made an imprint that is more obvious now than almost any other time of my life.

Thank you Dotty and Scotty for sharing your photo albums!

I need to get more recent pictures of my loved ones for my desk. They're all older, slimmer, and healthier now.

The snow here is falling in a way that suggests that any minute the cork will come out and we'll be buried. According to the forecasters that won't happen in Boston, and D.C. is already under a foot of the stuff. Also, the word "snowpocalypse," coined by the internets and popularized by damnportlanders has been picked up by major international news media. I'm looking forward to the many posts by my friends in the midatlantic states about their own snowpocalypses.

We finally finished watching "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" last night. Alexis said it looked like it was made by robots (I suggested perhaps the script-bot 2000) but had a general positive opinion of it. I enjoyed it a lot, an felt that the by-the-numbers script was probably an improvement over the deliberately confusing version spread over years of comic book storylines--including crap written by Rob Liefeld. It wasn't exactly Iron Man, but it was a vast improvement over the third X-Men movie.

After that, we were looking for something light and funny that we haven't watched over and over again (our cartoon collection is well-worn) and I remembered that I got a copy of Thor At the Bus Stop that my brother gave to my father to give to me. (He prefers the drug mule method of dvd exchange to trusting the us mail I guess.) Andy played it for us the last time the three of us were together and I loved it--A low-budget fantasy comedy held together with it's script and talented ensemble cast--oh, and the amazing props designed by art designer F. Andrew Taylor. Nepotism aside, it's really funny and heartwarming, and I hope that it comes to a film festival near you, Failing that, buy the DVD!



I said it was like a pg-rated Kevin Smith movie, but it's much funnier than that makes it sound. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to play on either of our semi-functional DVD players, so we'll have to bring it out to the x-box and make it a living room family fun time movie.

I went to visit my Dad the day before yesterday, driving right after work. I really hated the drive--the Mass Pike has become too small and too often congested with traffic, just like the roads it was designed to replace. But the next day, driving in the morning, it was really nice. I like the area a lot, especially north of Connecticut. If I thought there jobs for us there, and if I thought we could deal with cold and snow better in the country than in the city, I'd lobby hard for a move to Belchertown. As luck would have it, Alexis is going to Belchertown tomorrow to add to her photo portfolio. (Warning--naked picture of me hidden somewhere in that gallery.) Maybe she'll love it, probably she'll just complain about how cold it is.

I was surprised when I found out that non-New Englanders think the name "Belchertown" is funny. I've heard it since I was a child and never really thought about the fact that the word "belch" is in it. Now if it were "Flatulantown" that would be something.

EDITED TO ADD: Thanks to drhoz for this link of old photos of celebrities, in most cases before their peak of fame. A sample image:

My mom's memorial service is in a few hours. I've already posted my eulogy here and at facebook, but I'll read it today at 4:30. I've posted her obituary, and many people have said many kind things. Thank you. I'm not sad. I'm relieved that she's been released from sickness. I also posted a whole bunch of photos of her on facebook (where her sister and her family can see them), and I thought I should share them here, too, since I've brought you all this far on the journey.


( a bunch more )

Something that's been happening lately on Facebook: pictures from the past are surfacing. This is my roommate Jeanine and I in our Brighton apartment (about 5 years before the icon picture above).

This picture was taken in about 1975. I just shot it with my digital off the print on my dad's kitchen table, so the quality isn't great. The blob on my brother's forehead must be on the original. My dad is going to give me a disc full of pictures of my mother some of which I'll post here. I'm the little dark haired one. The little dog is my mom's dog Maxi.