Last Day of School, and a Little Quiver of the Lip

Walking out of Boy's school today, moving upstream through the dressed-down kids leaving for buses, was a poignant reminder of last days of school for me. Relief, giddiness, fear, sadness,  a hot emptiness of a long brown Dallas summer ahead of me.

A girl, maybe four and a half feet tall, passed me, tears running down her face, her eyes swollen, sobbing. That was the girl whose best friend is going away forever. She had all the time in the world in March. I saw her in 1977, too. I keep choking up when I think of her.

Girls hugging and laughing. Every other kid with a yearbook under their arm. Boys hugging, even, one boy with long hair that curled up at the ends, his friend short and dark. Unlike in my time, they were unashamed.  In my time, they wouldn't have hugged, lest the label of "fag" follow them to next year. Or, God forbid,  high school, where the oldest kids are three years older, and not just two, and have three years' more memories of hazing and bullying and if it was good enough for them, they'd like to share.

Girl on her fifth grade graduation day, in a Sunday dress and tennis shoes. I was saved from bawling at all of Summer's lasts, by how fast she'd gone from being my baby to being an exhausted ten-year-old and as bitter and disrespectful as a child raised by stage parents, by a cardinal.

Boy had a bad evening, letting the dogs out when he took King's keys to unlock the front door to go to the car to get his new roll of orange duct tape he'd been waiting for for hours. King, already stressed my his worry that I won't handle the summer, and a long wait at a drive through earlier, yelled at him. Boy, strung out from his eventful day, howled back. By the time I got the tape, he was broken down to heart-wrenching tears.

I took Boy out to the kitchen to use his sticky orange treasure to continue to entomb a container already wrapped in pink, green, electrical, package, and Scotch tapes. I went back to my studio to the sounds of tape making that satisfying SKRRRRIP. Boy let out one more pained howl, the last of his hurt, and began humming as he set to a task that is his secret, but we know is comfort.

And so to bed. It's just you and me, ice cream.

J.K. Rowling: Failure and Imagination at Harvard

Once again, J.K. Rowling has reduced me to tears.

Rowling gave the commencement speech at Harvard today. I hope each and every one of you will make time to read it, and do it in a place where no one can hear you cry, or will mind if you do. It's very funny in most, and heart wrenching when it isn't, and the hard parts are not about being poor.
On being memorable:

"If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement."

Failure:

"I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

Imagination:

"...humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

"[imagination] is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

"And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience...they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know."

San Diego After All, I Reckon

So:
I was promised local accommodations. I will be in SD from late Thursday to early Sunday. I am clean and well-mannered. poisonrational, was it you?

Second, anyone who has frequent flier miles they'd barter for art such as character design?