…you know her name, I cannot keep you from reading it, although it is obviously intended for her and not you, but i mention it because i know some of you are incessantly curious, and one of you could infer from this post a desire that you share the permalink with her.

for those of you wondering, no, she didn’t, and i in no way expected her to, and the admitted anticipation of it will simply remain until it happens, after which, a part of me will no doubt miss the anticipation, of course. so much of my life has been spent waiting and hoping, i never really know what to do with fulfillment anyway.

you can shut the hell up with your double-entendres by the way.

my love to you all. the world revolves. carry on.

ponder the categories, and this will make more sense.

if you use the word disappointed, i’ll slap you. i’m not disappointed, and no, i do not protest too much. in fact, i’m quite pleased that she apparently had better things to do (as i hoped for her on the 15th as a matter of fact), and that if she is considering making contact with me, that she is doing so at a measured gait.

~d~

Yesterday marked one month until I can legally talk to the Elder and Unknown, although I will ‘do the right thing’ and leave it up to her to contact me.

Only a month, already. Time has flown by this summer.

Although this is on my mind quite a bit, I haven’t written about it much in recent months, because there is, ultimately, little worth in worrying about it, obsessing about it, or in many ways even planning for it, because things rarely go as planned anyway, and I honestly possess no expectations. As far as negative potentials go, it may well be that our religious differences will limit our ability to communicate effectively, or that the distance will limit us to little more than cursory interaction. But, we’ll be here for her however she wants or needs, and even getting to know her a little bit over the past year or so has been more than I felt I had the right to hope for as it is.

We have planned for this time for several years, including making sure that #1 Daughter and #1 Son have been looking forward to it. They are excited about the prospect of meeting her, but are also aware that she has her own life and will move in her own time, and just because she turns eighteen on a certain day doesn’t mean that she’ll come flying out of the blue and plop herself in the midst of our lives. We will continue to take each day as it comes, as patiently as possible, and truly, while we are all anxious to meet her, the timeline is in the hands of the Elder and Unknown, not ours.

We have been so scattered this summer that we only just now realized that we didn’t do anything for her graduation, so the Spouse-Unit and I are trying to figure out what we can do for her eighteenth birthday. If the Elder and Unknown happens to be reading this, and has any suggestions in that regard, one hopes that she will filter such information through the Spouse-Unit or my mother. The Elder and Unknown may be intrigued to know that Internet domain names have been secured, literally, in her name in both .com and .net fashion. Such can be verified to typing the relevant domain names in her address bar. Whenever she wants to do something with them, she is most welcome to.

Ah, yes. I’m a sneaky bastard, aren’t I?

When the Elder and Unknown turns eighteen in slightly less than a month, one of the relevant factors in her life will indeed be Balance. The concept of Balance is special to me, because its number, eight, is one of my birth numbers, and it is something for which I continually strive, if not struggle from time to time. It’s one of my life-lessons, in other words. I’m trying to figure out how to put the category descriptions at the top of category pages, but in lieu of that, the description for the Balance category is this: “issues surrounding the Balance Archetype (Voyager Tarot) and its Attributes: Synthesis, Stagnation, Change, Harmony, and Guardian. also, “Justice” in traditional tarot; the general law of action and reaction; I Ching hexagram #63 ‘Chi Chi/After Completion’; the Nordic rune ‘Tiwaz’; the Kabbalah letter-word ‘Lamed’; alchemical Air; the numbers 8 and infinity; and Libra.” As you can see, Balance is a rather significant concept on many levels, and you can naturally infer a relevance far beyond the divination means I list in that description. In light of that, I sincerely hope that the upcoming year will be a good one for her. Balance is sometimes the mean of certain extremes, after all.

Come what may, #1 Son and I are still in the midst of soccer season. If the Elder and Unknown chooses to contact me on or around her birthday, such will thankfully be a few days after the South Dakota High School soccer tournament, which this year is up in Aberdeen. With only the last few recreational games ahead of us on our schedules at that point, we may even be in a state of mind that is a bit less scattered, and more conducive to her needs. We are all looking forward to that day, regardless of whether she contacts us or not. Here is hoping you the best, Elder and Unknown. May Peace stand over you in all things.

Sherri (who sadly falls into the category of “old friend”) has been bugging me about how the trip went for me. sadly, i am still assimilating it. she also thinks the “installment method” sucks. oh well. there’s always a critic somewhere. responsibilities aside, the reason why i’m doing the installment thing is because one post would be terribly long, and i’m told i’m better when taken in smaller doses.

so….hrm….where to start with this one?

i guess i’ve already noted the most important part: we didn’t get to meet The Elder and Unknown after all. she won’t be getting her driver’s license until her 18th birthday, and since she is living again with her mother and step-father, her personal freedom is anything but expansive. the Spouse-Unit did call her and talk with her a bit, which i think was odd for both of them, but pleasant as well. i think it meant a lot to The Elder and Unknown that we did try to meet with her. the Spouse-Unit says she didn’t sound too terribly Texan, so i guess there’s hope for her future! (oh, me SO funny).

we stayed at the Hyatt downtown along the River Walk, as i mentioned before. it looks something like this from the River level, and this is the inside of the hotel. the last time i was there was my senior year of high school for the Texas State Choir concert. they made us all stay there, even though some of us were from San Antonio. talk about blurred memories! (in a positive way!)

our room was on the second floor (which because of two floors of conference and meetings rooms, is actually the fourth floor), but i did go up top and take some photos looking down. a little over halfway up on this photo, just right of center, one floor is jogged in a little to the right. right there was the room we stayed in.

when i have the time to get a gallery of photos from the trip up online, you’ll see that i frequently pretended #1 Daughter and #1 Son were along, and i tried to capture things i knew they’d like to see. however, when i get that gallery up, i know i’m going to be asked to get other galleries up, so i have to go carefully with these things. wedding season approacheth, and all that….

this was taken a few minutes prior to the photo i included upon my return—the bridge down there being where i took that photo from. this part of the River Walk is not a natural part of the river. i think it was made sometime during the 1970’s. just past that bridge and to the right, is the Convention Center. to the left is some sort of shopping extravaganza from hell that didn’t exist when i was growing up….er….getting older….down there. it was under construction when i briefly returned to San Antonio after Basic Training. like any mall, it has a cheap food court, so the Spouse-Unit and i ate over there a couple of times.

so, i guess that’s enough tap-dancing around impressions of the place while playing tour guide to my semi-nostalgic reminiscences.

to be honest, i could have driven around San Antonio anywhere i wantedd (traffic and reconstruction endeavors allowing, of course), but i didn’t. on the initial drive in from the airport downtown to the Hyatt, it was immediately clear that we were simply visiting some big-ass city. since in so many other interpretations i wasn’t coming home, i slipped into a comfortable tourist mode. the Spouse-Unit and i had to do the same thing over the summer when we visited Albuquerque. the River Walk was “safer” in that regard: it’s changed a bit, and a couple of the restaurants i liked back then no longer exist. but even with those changes and the construction on some parts of it, it felt a lot more homier than anywhere else i visited. plus being so picturesque, it was much more personally gratifying to hang out down there and shoot than slog around in the traffic and try to catch brief glimpses of half-remembered places.

i did go back to my old neighborhood, and will probably write about that little excursion next. like everything else, it had changed a lot. i drove by old schools and places where i used to hang out: all measurably changed, not that i expected anything else. change is always noticeable when you aren’t in the middle of it happening. but since i was pretty young when i left, and hadn’t really been driving all that long either, my memories of San Antonio are ultimately pretty confined to downtown, my old neighborhood (several square miles if you include where we lived across to where i went to school and where many of my friends lived), Loop 410, places i went to church, the Mission Trail, etc.

actually, i remember more detail about Albuquerque than i do San Antonio, and i spent barely 1/3 of the amount of time there. San Antonio has just become so huge, i wonder if, unless you live there or visit frequently, it’s really much like coming home for anyone. extrapolating from the 2000 Census, the city is pretty close to twice as populated as it was when i left back in the mid-1980’s, and it shows no signs of slowing down. ah….progress….

i used this lens a lot along the River Walk, largely because it’s representative of my memories of growing up down there. an inherent myopia and a type of fixation that was rarely exactly on center. the particular location i shot this from makes it look like i was on a boat myself, but i wasn’t, nor was i in the water (ew! yes, it really is that green without any early Saint Paddie’s Day shenanigans).

it might be fun to take the kids down there someday, but that would probably be more of a Six Flags/Sea World kind of thing—which brings to mind that those places didn’t exist while i was growing up there, either. i’m glad i went along with the Spouse-Unit on this trip, though. i seem to have finally laid to rest at least one old ghost (i’ll write about that later), and seeing the changes to some of the places that used to haunt my dreams has brought me at least a little peace.

one’s seventeenth year is a series of powerful moments, often distinguished more by the random influences which surround them, than by the impetus given to them at the time.

or at least, that’s how i remember being seventeen, that time-between-times. the last moments of a childhood long since denied and arbitrarily circumscribed by a society possessed by the allure of attainment.

this far into the future of my brief allotment of time, i have long since ceased wondering if anything i thought back then truly holds any relevance today.

but i know that it does.

i think upon seventeen today, as i have on so many days of late, because my daughter is seventeen. and if i could tell her anything, it would be that since there is so much more to come, there is no need to worry about what has been, or failed to be.

she doesn’t know how intimate a part of my life she has been throughout her life, because she does not know me. and likewise, neither her brother.

over one’s seventeenth year, a star shines brightly: a beacon, a wonder. an inspiration, an investment of hope in the light of uncountable thermo-nuclear reactions.

when i was but a few years younger, i wondered if she thought of me. grown less selflish now, i simply wonder if she knows that all the stars do shine for her.

i wish that i was the one to have hung them for her. maybe someday, i can be.