We took Grex to the Medieval Faire today. This is the first time we've taken him since he was about 4. He was such a pain in the butt that time that we did not attempt it again until now. But he had a really good time, and so did we. We bought him a sword and shield ("sword and board," as Gray calls it. That's World of Warcraft speak, apparently), and ate faire food and watched the acrobats and elephant rides and shopped for stuff. It was a beautiful spring day and we all have sunburns on our noses (and at least one of us on our scalp where our hair used to be...)

Grayson was very cute, wheeling about with his sword. I could tell he was having WOW dreams. A big ole' geek, just like his dad.

Cosmic Messages

Last night at book club we experienced a strange interdimensional event, I think.

The group met at our house, and we were reading the book I chose, which was "Apocalypse 2012," about all the various ways the world is going to end on Dec. 21, 2012. I'm a big sucker for End-of-the-World stuff.

Anyway, we learned that one of our members, Amy, has been feeling sad the past few weeks because her aunt has cancer and is almost certainly going to die soon. (Yes, Perhaps a book about the end of the world is not the best for someone under these circumstances, but of course I couldn't have known about Amy's aunt when I chose the book.)

We were all well into the meeting, and well into the wine when Amy suddenly burst into tears out of the blue. She apologized profusely, but explained that she was just under a lot of emotional stress because of her aunt's illness. She thanked us all for being so supportive (of course, the meeting came to a halt and we all gathered around to try to comfort her), and told us that she was sure that in the next week she was going to be attending her aunt's funeral and she would remember this night and all the love and support she received from all of us. It was very touching and very sad. Clearly Amy loves her aunt very much. She kept saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," for crying, for crashing the book club with her grief, but we teased her gently that she must not apologize any more to us, or for every apology we were going to make her drink an extra glass of wine at next month's meeting.

Amy is very sweet and gentle, and always thoughtful of others, so we knew we'd never get her to stop apologizing. After Amy's husband came to take her home, someone said "I bet we get an email of apology from Amy tomorrow," and we laughed.

Well, this morning we did get an email. But she said she was writing to thank us for our love and support, and to tell us that she learned from her husband on the drive home that, at the same time that Amy had been having her sudden meltdown at my house, her aunt passed away. Just as she was telling us that she would remember that night and how kind we had been when the time came... the time was there.

I think that today we all feel as if there was a sort of inter-planar communication going on at that meeting last night, between Amy and her aunt. That somehow on some subconscious level, Amy knew that her aunt was dying, and that was why she was suddenly overcome with grief.

I feel particularly odd about it because just before Amy started crying, I had been talking about how I don't believe that there is any cosmic justice in the world. I don't really believe in karma in the sense that people who are not good people get their come-uppance some day. I don't believe there is an afterworld in any understandable way like that, or any cosmic judge who doles out rewards and punishments. And if our spirits are recycled to become new people, I don't think they retain any baggage from the previous existence.

What do I know, huh?

A Question of Identity

I have spent the last two days at work shooting snapshots of the winners of the sixth annual Oklahoma Native American Youth Language Fair. It is an event we do every spring for kids studying their Native languages. They come from all over Oklahoma and sometimes states beyond to compete in spoken language, performance, essay, poster art, multi-media and book categories. This year we had a total of about 1000 students, spread over two days, aging from 4 to 18. They represented most of the 38 recognized tribes of Oklahoma, and one unrecognized (Euchee). They spoke 25 languages.

This is a gruelling event for the organizers, the volunteers and judges. It has been a busy couple of days for me each year as I host television and newspaper reporters, and this year my assistant and I also took photos of all of the winners so we can send out press releases and photos to their home towns and tribal papers after the fair.

The little kids, on the first day (Pre-K through 5th grade) are very cute. They are usually either all dressed in matching T-shirts with their school logo, or all in adorable miniature versions of their tribal regalia, singing nursery rhymes, counting in their language, or identifying pictures of animals.

The second day is more intense, with 500 adolescents, from 6th to 12th grade. These also have their school T-shirts or letter jackets, but now the regalia is the real deal, and many performers wear full fancy dance regalia, with feathered headdresses and bustles. The girls wear ribbon dresses or buckskin jingle dresses and moccasins or leggings. It is a multi-cultural experience to go out there and mix with them and be in the caucasian minority.

Most of the faces in the crowd are recognizably Native, but many are not. There are blond girls and kids with light colored skin or eyes who do not look Native American at all, or are recognizable as Indian only in this context when they are part of a larger group that looks more Indian than they do. But they are learning the languages, and embracing the culture. It is moving to watch.

This year I was much more involved in the fair because I had to wait through each group of competitions before I could photograph the winners. I was impressed at the beauty and utter foreignness of the languages I heard. I was pleasantly humbled to hear a judge or emcee tell a joke in a Native Language and be one of the only people who didn't get it. And I was, lets face it, a little jealous. Jealous of all those beautiful young Indian girls with their long black hair and dark eyes, dancing to the rhythm of the drums in their beautiful, jingling beaded dresses or stomp-dancing with their loud rattling strings of cans full of beans or pebbles tied around their ankles. There is a long tradition of ritual and significance there that I only begin to sense.

There was a film, produced by one of the high school groups, in which they travelled around and filmed and interviewed elders of various tribes. They filmed a family dinner of frybread and beans in which one elder talked about "identity," and "who you are." You preserve your identity by preserving the traditional rituals and language and behaviors. She said "if it walks like a skunk and looks like a skunk and smells like a skunk, it's a skunk. How else do you know what it is?" And I thought. "How do I know what I am?"

I have no tradition, no heritage, no ritual to draw upon to define who I am. No beadwork or dance step, no song or drumbeat. It walks like a skunk, but it looks like an otter and smells like an eel. What on earth is it? My mother's family comes from some Native American stock. Choctaw, I think. But that heritage is unclaimed, as far as I know. And certainly not visible in most of our family, with the exception of one of my aunts, who got all the dark hair and skin and eyes, the Indian cheekbones and height, as well as a turning inward, a reticence that I associate with Indian people, though that could be my obnoxious caucasian viewpoint.

Then today I was reading an interview with the author Lisa See, whose book, Peony in Love, I am listening to on c.d. in the car on my commute, and enjoying tremendously. See is of Chinese heritage, though it is many generations back and has been bred out of her face so that she is no longer recognizable as Asian to look at, though her family still claims and identifies with that culture. She said:

"I hadn’t really thought too much about my identity. Who does, after all? All of a sudden people asked me – and still do – what are you, Chinese or American? I know that because of how I look, I will always be seen as a bit of an outsider in Chinatown, but to me it’s home. It’s what I know. The same can be said for when I go to China. To me, it’s just a bigger Chinatown – very familiar and comfortable, but again, because of how I look I’ll always be seen as an outsider. Then when I’m out in the larger white community in the United States, I look like I belong but sometimes I don’t feel like I belong. That world often seems strange and very foreign to me. So in writing these books I’m also trying to figure out who I am. How and where do I fit in? Here, there, nowhere?"

Why this sudden convergence of talk about identity for me today? A cosmic signal that I should think about where I fit in in the world? Do I believe in such things? It walks like a skunk... but it looks like... I don't know.

I guess I don't know what it is.