Cardboard Rhino

enjoy this picture which is just like the one dad sent

I’ve been making picture pancakes lately. Mostly bears, but here is Raffi the Vegetarian Alligator – who lives in the River running through the Gunu Forest.

Traditional Navajo prayer. (Learned in Girl Scouts.)

A poem I sent my father for his birthday sometime in the ’90s. Courtesy of Steve O’Keefe.

Cyrus has had some breakthroughs with drawing lately. The attached images are all exceptions from the rule. His preferred mode is abstract expressionism mixed with a constant nearly-nonsense monologue. But he has generated these beings complete with eyes and arms and all.

The ears on the last one are my work, but the rest is all him.

Sometimes at about 2 minutes to midnight,

I notice that I am reading an article about demographic shifts in China

And attempting to predict, using gut-level hunches

the impact of those shifts on the world in 2060

when my 3 year old child will be 12 years older than I am now

and I notice that also, in another window,

I am running a background script

that works to identify the ways 

I am not being an effective agent of change

and maximizing my potential impact

on the shape of the world in 40 years

And I realize that this article

On demographic shifts in China

Is only one of many tabs

and that there are tabs on ancient philosophers, 

and saints, 

and current events 

and murderers

and I realize that if I had to describe what I am doing right now to myself

I would probably have to say to myself

That I am gathering information, and laying plans

related to the saving of the world. 

And that this is not a reasonable thing to be doing right now. 

And may actually impede my ability 

to do the few things I have actually already been called to do, 

Happy Birthday Dad. This year, as your present, I am sharing with you this completely real, undoctored photo I found of you in Truman Capote’s archive.