Photos You Can Hear

Mt. Horeb Holy Church Choir, Kigali, Rwanda. These should cheer you up a bit after the previous post. Photos by the gifted and adventurous Christina Syndikus.




The woman in purple was totally, I mean totally. I wanted to either marry her or steal her life force, assuming those are two different things. The woman in glasses next to her is her sister, and also a rocker.







I sometimes think that if you knew you'd be singing this music at the end of the week, you could stand almost anything during the six days prior. Plus there are rehearsals.








A singer in the choir, she just walked to the front and did that once in a while. Wait, what do I mean walked to the front?







It was a privilege to be there.












Okay, here are some more. I took these.






waiting for church






Christina outside church (Paige in foreground)






choir strutting






in purple





Yes!!!

Attack from the Distaff Side

Returning for a moment to the milieu of the previous post, when we look back at the dawn of time we find book and movie titles such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Man in the White Suit, The Boy with Green Hair. Males baffled by circumstance, yearning for nothing more than a modicum of peace and security. And when we look for similar titles on what used to be called the distaff side, what do we find? Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman! These men are just sitting quietly, humbly, merely hoping to be allowed to watch a football game, and...they're ATTACKED! By fifty-foot women!

It's the story of my life.

The Mantra

The mantra of early 21st century America: “He’s such a great guy, but he’s not a great guy for me. He’s a great guy for someone else.” Some add sorrowfully, “It’s so hard when you really love a person.”

You hear it everywhere: on streetcorners, in bars, at the next table in a restaurant, by the racks at the discount clothing outlet… Imagine a nation of people too wonderful to be right for each other!

valuable hair, umbrella man, sleek legs

1. Toweling dry, one of my hairs lands on the rim of the bathtub curled in the shape of the tai chi (ak/a yin yang sign). Should I sell it on eBay?

2. A cloudy day at last; a man walks down the street carrying a folded umbrella. A welcome portent of rain, or is he just a doofus?

3. Few epiphanies are sexier than that constituted by a blonde in a business suit and heels striding down the sidewalk sipping from a takeout container of coffee.

The Nanny Problem

A little blond-haired boy, a toddler, is riding in a shopping cart facing his nanny, a young Japanese woman who is -- I cannot adequately convey this -- who is so beautiful that the peaches in the produce bin start leaking when she stops to consider them.

(Am I the only one who notices? Have miracles become so commonplace? The other shoppers are older women, they’re not going to give her an extra glance, and the two guys stacking endive in the corner are discussing the imminent arrival of a shipment of Holland tomatoes. This is a fancy store.)

She’s tall and slim in a cream-colored silk blouse with the cuffs folded above her wrists; two extraordinarily fortunate gold bracelets dangle on the left wrist knob. Ivory skin draws her eyelids tight toward wide cheekbones, and her black hair sweeps above one ear and down to the other shoulder. Utamaro would have made a famous series of prints of her.

The blond-haired boy, drinking milk from a sippie cup, looks right and left at this excellent world, but always his gaze returns to the center, to her. His clean white sneakers, bobbing, kick her softly in the tummy. She doesn’t object but doesn’t encourage. She’s absorbed in her employer’s shopping list. She’s attentive to the boy, she answers his two-syllable questions and offers him a sweet cracker from a box in her handbag, but she doesn’t baby-talk or burble or dandle.

With a calm smile she takes a delft-blue washcloth from the bag and wipes a tear-streak of milk from his chin. He grabs for it, and looks at it with wonder because she has touched it.

The poor little guy. He’s going to spend his whole life searching for her, and he’ll never see her like again.

Watching her push the cart to the checkout in her long flared cocoa-brown pants, I say to myself, “I want a nanny.”