Ten years ago tonight, under a summer moon at a very wild party, I fell in love for the last time.

And I have a story to tell.

It is story that took ten years to write and it isn’t even done.

It is a story of new beginnings, and reinventions.

There is death, and there is new life.

There is joy beyond imagining and tears from the heart of despair.

There are kings and queens, and great disasters, and enormous triumphs.

We have seen the best and the worst of our natures.

Falling in love is easy.  That’s love as a noun.

Loving, actively loving, every day, for better or worse, through the endless rhythms of every day life, is a dedication and a calling.

But we are still here.

Together.

And we are still in love.

To my husband,

You are, and always will be, the love of my life.  I would not rewrite one chapter of the story we have written.  I will always wait breathlessly for the next installment.

Even though I know how it ends.

Together.

MTAMTE, Baby.

Yes, I have been experimenting with themes.

I am also trying to figure out how the heck to get my Theme Switcher to set back to default.

Sigh.

WordPress.

Love it, but sometimes I want to slam the keyboard around a bit.

We took my son to the town playground Sunday evening. Our town park isn’t fancy, but it has an embarrassment of riches in the eyes of a three-year-old. It has THREE sets of playground equipment, well worn, but well maintained, separated by a creek bed (which from my childhood is a necessary element of imaginary play), two bridges and a walking path. Harry ran between the three in ecstatic confusion, hardly knowing which slide was the fastest, which ladder the most challenging, which swing went the highest. He was in little boy heaven.

Except that Harry largely plays alone. It isn’t that he inherited his mother’s solitary tendencies. From a social standpoint, Harry is his father’s son; easy and outgoing, always the first to start a conversation. But he has almost no interest in children his own age. Harry is drawn to older kids like a June bug to a porchlight, and he approaches it with the same physical bombardment. With his sophisticated-but-still-toddler diction, he will strike up a conversation and shadow them, trying to draw them into his chase and mirror games.

Older children of our friends, through familiarity or affection, indulge Harry. He never met a teenager he didn’t like, or didn’t like him, and my friends’ children have endless patience for him. The children of strangers are not always so consistently enamored of him, with his non-existent introductions and his immediate familiarity. They don’t always play the games that they are automatically co-opted into with such enthusiasm by my son and are most often unwitting and uncooperative players in his impromptu games of tag. I watch his interactions with a mixture of envy at the ease that he approaches strangers and tiny referent pains at the little rejections that do not seem to faze him or daunt his enthusiasm at trying to make a new friend.

Last evening Harry “started” a game of tag among the monkey bars with a slender little blond girl about 3-4 years his senior. He ran up to her and then ran away squealing “You can’t catch me!” and I braced for her to stare quizzically at him and walk away. But she didn’t. She turned and chased him and then he chased her back. She ran nimbly away from him, always staying just out of Harry’s reach, to his obvious delight. His face shone as he chased her, to almost catch up before reversing and running breathlessly away until she pursued.

When she crossed the creek, which Harry was not allowed to do, her father coaxed her back, telling her to be mindful of her little playmate. And she was.  For an hour or more, they chased and played back and forth amongst the slides and swings and see-saws. Trying to instill something approaching social graces out of him, my husband directed Harry to introduce himself and ask the little girl her name. She was Samantha. She looked like a Samantha – golden skinned and blonde and patient and quiet and gentle.

The meaning of the name Samantha?

Listener of God.

Blessed are the Samanthas of the world and the parents who raise them. Because they answer the prayers of little boys and their mothers, one breathless hour of tag at a time.

My son picked up the most incredibly ORANGE worsted cotton off the shelf the other day and demanded I make him a hat:

It was a challenge to match the wattage of that hat, but if there was ever a better depiction of “sunny smile”, I am not sure I have seen it. 

I read Dooce regularly. I love her blog. I can’t always put my finger on it, but I think she has about the level of tenderness and dysfunction in her life that I can identify with.

She was writing about the best relationship advice she had ever been given, and one of them JUMPED out at me.

So, for all my wonderful single woman friends out there, here is the very best dating advice I have ever seen in print:

From Maggie Mason: “When I was single, I decided I wouldn’t marry a man unless I could be proud if we had a son who turned out exactly like him.”

I’m glad I followed this advice before I ever saw it.

I could write about this past weekend, about Kung Fu Panda at the IMAX (an early Father’s Day present for my husband), or Harry’s red-letter day at the water park, where he would have made me ride the kiddie water slide with him 50 times back to back if I had not steered him away gently toward ice cream and the wave pool.

But inspiration has been deserting me lately. So instead, I will join Shep in a 5 – question meme.

First, the obligatory posting of the rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me” or something of an equally pithy nature.
2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions of a very personal nature. Be warned!
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions, or there will be trouble.
4. You will include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them 5 questions.

Now, the questions that Shep asked me, with answers:

1. We all know you love to read – when looking for a book to read, what grabs your attention?

I have a list of must-read authors, and even though I am not much of a serial afficianado, I have a few I follow. So, if we are assuming that I am in my established buying pattern, I will buy just about anything by Jeffrey Deaver, Michael Connolley, Douglas Preston, Bill Bryson, Lincoln Child, Carol O’Connell, P. D. James, Alexander McCall Smith, and Eoin Colfer. I will also buy anything in Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, even though I don’t always purchase all of their works. I also read a lot of non-fiction science and history books. Interestingly, I don’t go for much historical fiction unless it’s historical mystery.

If I am looking for something new, I don’t know that I really have rules. I am a huge fan of mystery and espionage novels (I cut my teeth on Higgins and Forsyth). I like well-written non-fiction, particularly accounts of historical events or the history of science. Although I am not a huge biography fan, I often like memoirs, though not those of famous people. I spend a lot of time reading the jackets of books in airports, and I am pretty quick to try a new author at least once. I am fascinated by books on neurology and psychology – Phantoms of the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran rocked my world.

2. I know you’ve been burned out on the SCA for a while, what if anything would get you back playing again?

Oh, that’s an easy one. Fighting. I mean, I love my friends and I love the company, but ultimately I see most of those people outside the SCA. I don’t need the SCA for their friendship – at least the ones that matter. I have already starting coming back because the fighting jones is just too much of a draw. Coming back from another layoff has not been easy, but I can’t seem to walk away from it. There’s just no replacement in my life for it. We have started to play at about a tournament a month, and when the heat of the summer is past, gas allowing, we hope to get back to playing at a reasonable level.

3. What were the three biggest differences for you from being Queen in an established Kingdom Like Meridies, and being first Queen of Gleann Ahbann?

Interestingly, I felt free to experiment as Crown of Meridies. In an established Kingdom, if you misstep, you know the Kingdom will shake you off as soon as you step down. We felt less free in our GA reign because first and foremost, our reign had to REALLY be about the Kingdom and not about us. EVERYTHING was being set up from scratch. It had to be about what the Kingdom wanted as a vision of itself and less about ours. It was the reign to set the tone of the Kingdom, to solidify it’s character and identity. The scrutiny of the Crown was intensified, and the pressure was stifling, even as the enthusiasm of the populace was at a much higher pitch.

We were nobodies in the Meridian reign and the established Peers were much quicker to step in with discreet commentary and advice – even when we didn’t agree, it was invaluable. By the second reign, we were both Peers with established households and we found that people were more reluctant to offer opinions unsolicited (at least directly to us). We had to really WORK to get input. It was counterintuitive, and it was horribly isolating. We had a lot more guidance the first reign than the second, which is normal for second time reigns, BUT we were in a situation where that second-time reign was NOT a standard reign, and that guidance was needed. Badly.

And that brings me to this – this was NOT a standard reign, and even though I had gone through this before during Calontir’s Kingdom transition I was not prepared for the fact that even the most expected, most amicable, most necessary Kingdom transitions are sheer social chaos. Every person is trying to claim their little piece of ground in the Kingdom’s history. During a normal reign it is impossible to make everyone happy, in a first reign it seems nigh unto impossible to make ANYONE happy, because there is this temporal IMPERATIVE to everyone for something to be a first. But realistically you can’t give that to everyone. So we crossed our fingers and held our breath, but it took an huge emotional toll. Much more so than our previous reign. I was more tired, more disillusioned, after the First GA reign.

I guess those are the big three – but I have to add the obvious. When we did the First GA reign, we were reeling from personal loss. On one hand, it may be one of the only things that carried us with sanity through those horrible months after Katrina. Both the support from our SCA friends, and the outside demand to keep moving and keep planning toward that goal carved us a path through a lot of uncertainty. But it didn’t leave us with a lot of reserves when it was over. That wrinkle makes it really hard to separate the differences between the two. It permeated everything.

All I know is this – every time we sit the throne, we lose our house. Call me crazy, but I am going to be pretty circumspect before I do it again.
4. I know your secret (or not so secret) of being a They Might Be Giants fan, how did that come to be?

My first serious live-in boyfriend and my best male friend were both TMBG fans, so I kind of got acculturated to it. I am also a fan of that kind of intelligent absurdist humor – both in writing and in music. If that isn’t enough, I saw them live in Columbia, MO, and it was HANDS DOWN the best concert I have ever seen. We brought them out for five encores. The only thing that came even remotely close was Carlos Santana and Rusted Root at the Riverfront. If I wasn’t hooked before I saw them live, I certainly was afterward. They are even better in person.

5. You are well traveled both inside and outside the SCA – if you couldn’t stay where you are now, and had to move tomorrow – where would you go and why? answer inside and outside the SCA and they can be two separate answers.

Truthfully SCA wise I am exactly where I want to be. Choosing another Kingdom would be hard. Meridies and Calontir immediately leap to mind, BUT, I learned a lesson when I went back to Calontir for grad school that you can never really go “back” places. Your heart keeps telling you that you can, and somehow it’s hard to fight the idea that you can step in where you left off. It’s difficult. Even more so than transitioning to someplace new. I have friends in the Midrealm and Northshield (deep connections there), Trimaris, and Ansteorra. I also have an affinity for Aethelmearc, Ealdomere and the Outlands. So it’s easier to say where I do NOT think I could fit in, as much as I LOVE the people there, I think An Tir, Atenveldt, East, West and Atlantia would do me in. I just have a hard time wrapping my brain around their culture.

Real-life, I can tell you that I love Hawaii with a passion almost unequalled by anyplace on earth. I have never felt more totally in tune with a place as I have the times I have spent there. I also have a deep attraction to Washington D.C. for the cultural mix and Boulder, Colorado for the easy-going attitude, and the scenery. And, as eager as I was to leave after grad school, I miss Columbia. It is the perfect mix of small town and small city. Low unemployment, low crime, low cost of living, world-class healthcare and a user-friendly government. Hard to beat that.

If I were to leave the country, there are three of our northern neighbor cities that I could easily live in – Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal (even IF I would have to learn more than my street-sign French). Growing up on the border and having French-Canadian roots no doubt influences this. And I have a short list of cities in Europe that I would be willing to relocate to if the right financial package came along… 🙂

So, there you go – my answers, or in some cases, non-answers.

Have you ever had one of those days where you thought your head was going to explode all over someone, and it isn’t even lunchtime yet?

Oh yeah.

It’s one of those.

I decided to buy my husband a Zune for his birthday. We have both been in a love affair with the Zune since I got my first one on Mother’s Day last year, enough so that he bought me my 80G Gen 2 Zune for Christmas when my 1st Generation Zune was only six months old.

Since that time, they issued the new 80G in Red.

I love Red.

He has an iPod Photo that has been slowly dying and has long since ceased to hold his entire music collection. He uses his mp3 player even more heavily than I do, and there has been this undercurrent of guilt at my overabundance of newer, higher capacity, players. It was getting to me, and his birthday was my best opportunity to rectify the situation

The conversation went like this:

“Honey, I am going to get you a new Zune for your birthday. Do you want the black, or the new red?”

“Well, they didn’t have the red when I bought yours, and I know how much you love it. Why don’t you buy yourself a new red one and give me your black one.?”

<Blink, Blink>

“Um, are you sure about that?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s only six months old, right?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess”

<Moment of extreme guilt>

<SQEEEEEEAAAAAALLLLLL!!!!!>

I have my material girl moments.

And I have the best husband on the planet.

This is docked on my desk, right now:

And this is a very sexy red. Deep, beautiful fingernail polish red. Sportscar red. Little Red Dress Red.

Have I mentioned that great husband?

My son, without prompting, used his potty for solid-waste deposition this morning.

And promptly reminded me what this meant.

Must go buy more chocolate.

And I must remind my son to be grateful – at this point in his life, parental pride more easily earned than it will be at any point in his future.

EVER.

My son has taken to wiping off his kisses. If I ask him for a kiss, he will obediently raise his lips and then immediately wipe the back of his hand across his mouth. Although it is completely ridiculous for this to upset me, my heart sinks just a tiny bit at this little act of rejection.

Harry spent this weekend with his paternal grandmother – his Southern “Mimi.” At least his displays of independence are an equal-opportunity affair, but my mother-in-law’s reaction was more circumspect – “Oh, baby, you can’t wipe off my kisses, you are only rubbing them in,” she laughs to him.

I came back from a girl weekend with Charlotte and Amy-Renee to pick Harry up from his uncle’s gym, where he was happily expending all of his abundant energy running around on the gymnastics equipment. As we were visiting, Amy-Renee, his surrogate aunt, scooped him up to plant long-delayed kisses on his little face. Harry put the usual defiant hand to his lips and wiped and then rubbed his hand down to his little chest.

“I am rubbing them in, right down to my heart.”

And right down into ours.