Friday, November 17, 2006

Faces

When Blaise was Danny, we traveled together to China to complete the Mei An adoption. Since I traveled a lot, he was always interested in wherever I went and knew I would come home with cool stuff. It was rarely stuff that you'd buy in a gift shop. It was usually some haggled piece of used thing or other. It is the story that goes along with the gift that makes it special.

One of the most gratifying things for me is when Blaise travels to foreign soil, he returns with objects that have stories, not usually from a gift shop, but a haggled thing. When we were together in China, he bought locally produced music on CD's that must have been burned one at a time. Things like that.

I've had the fortune of traveling with a camera and could come home with more than memories of those places. In fact, the faces most often of the children there seem to stick with me most. I have cut together some of the children who got me most and uploaded it to YouTube. Some of the footage was captured by other producers from Fresh Air Media in Auburn, CA. The video is one of my favorite things.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Second Pictures...

I'm astounded that Dusty turns 16 this week. Wow. I stand and look at him nearly eye to eye and marvel at the gentleman he has become. My gaze is not complete before the bubble pops and I hear him being snide to his brother, or kicking the little ones out of his room. Same guy. Polite and a young gentleman, tugging against the webbing of his escape velocity.

How hard it is to remember being that age. What ramblings in my mind about girls and parties. We can't ever escape our own gravity as it happens. Both gentleman and cretan. So Dusty is balanced I think. He has more to say than most kids his age, and his opinions are so often couched in empathy. He states them often as questions. Like this one: "Really? Don't you think that's gross?" And then he laughs his head off.

When he was twelve months old, he could laugh himself into falling over. How was that possible that a one year old got the humor of a situation? He hasn't changed in that way in 15 years. He can still laugh his head off, and often when he doesn't know it's him that's funny.

Somehow he has the ability to see what's material and at the same time, aparently, see something else from a memory or an idea, just as real as the material. Once he was frustrated by my inability to understand what he was talking about, and said, "you know, like I'm looking at that glass of water there, but can see a tree that's just as real?" That's when I knew I'd met my imagination's match. We dubbed the phenomenon, "second pictures."

Dusty's greatest inventions to date are the many names he came up with when he was just starting to talk. Hugliss Poombey, Hordo and Bookey Honk all became names of characters in a story or two. And of course his famous insult delivered to his older brother, "...you...fart felly blat snapper!" As mad as he was, he laughed so hard that his four year old body was soon prostrate on the floor.