I am late for the Rosh Hashanah / New Year train; my life is overfull, but I press on, with brevity to the max:
5787 Shana Tovah!
Archive for the ‘Events and occasions’ Category
What’s your number?
September 15, 2026The group birthday card
September 13, 2026Arriving a bit after the day itself (9/6), a big (two 8 x 12 panels) greeting attached to the handle to the front door of my apartment. Signed by many of the other residents at Avant. None of whom I have met by name (though we might have exchanged friendly hellos in the elevator). But a sweet gesture towards someone who sticks out as wildly different from the rest — gay spice, as one of the staff calls it.
I’ve mounted it temporarily with artist’s tape on the open door of the linen closet, so I can see it from the worktable where I labor with computer.
Pinned with Pride
September 11, 2026[I started this posting a few days ago, but was balked from moving ahead by bad juju in both Facebook and WordPress. The curses magically lifted on 9/9. So I’m back on task now, but it’s 9/11 (25th anniversary) and apparently I’m going to be weeping non-stop all day, while I plug away at my work. Life lurches on]
Yet another birthday present for me, small but touching: two small enamel lapel pins: one in the form of a flag, one a plain rectangle (both are just an inch across):
(#1) The flag pin
(#2) The rectangle pin
Both of them from the program director Manalee Shukla here at Avant (a friend I’ve posted about several times, because we share a pleasure in the culture of her native land, India, and because she appreciates my injecting a note of gay spice into the Avant experience (meanwhile, I’ve warned her that her two bicultural kids are about to finish a transformation into entirely American boys; I have plenty of sociolinguistic stories from personal experience as well as the literature — all that professional preparation turns out to be genuinely useful in daily life).
Sing while we trip it
September 8, 2026🎶 🎶 It’s 9/8, Anton Dvořák’s birthday (1841), which will serve as a lead-in to a fabulous performance of music (by Purcell, not Dvořák) that Ellen Kaisse e-mailed to me as a (9/6) birthday present, stroking one of the passions — for music — that animate my life (two others I have recently posted about: the multiplicity of languages, cultures, subcultures, and life histories; and moral purpose — yeah, that one sounds like swaggering, but I really mean it)
Before I leave AD, a note on him from my 1/27/24 posting “Spillville”:
let me recommend the Wikipedia article on Dvořák, for its detailed telling of a remarkable life, of great talent, a lot of pluck, a fair amount of luck, generous humanity, and the benefit of champions, advocates on your behalf (in this case, primarily Johannes Brahms)
Labor Day 2026 #1
September 5, 2026It’s Labor Day weekend in my country — unofficially serving also as the end of summer — and we are supposed to be celebrating ordinary working people (OWP). Eventually, I’ll grind into the tangled mass of sociocultural attitudes and practices clustered around the concept of OWP in America, but today I’m starting with the small and personal.
The birthday zone
September 4, 2026Well, the special birthday zone, embracing my 9/6 birthday and the 10/26 birthday of my first male lover, Larry Schourup, a time suffused with delighted memories of our coming together in the spring of 1969, the way that changed both our lives, and how it led to a lifelong affectionate friendship, rewarding for both of us (we exchanged e-mail yesterday, 57 years after those days).
Low spark
September 1, 2026🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for September, in the middle of another run of AZ-connected birthdays (not of famous people, however admirable; but of (still living) people who are important to me): 8/27 Ken Rudolph of soc.motss (85); 8/30 Ellen Sulkis James, a long-ago companion of mine on the staff of the Reading (PA) Eagle (86); 8/31 Benita Bendon Campbell, dear friend since Princeton in the 1960s and my connection to the late Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky) (90); 9/2 Mike Jankulak of soc.motss (57); and 9/6, yes, me (86)
9/1 came to me with a morning name: The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys — from what experiential or mental source I know not. But with a shiver of delight.
A gross hybrid
August 20, 2026The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of today (8/20), depicting a preposterous cartoon event:
It’s a Renaissance Faire and a Ren & Stimpy Show animated cartoon (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
A crossing of the decorously ornamental and the enthusiastically down-and-dirty.