What remains truly amazing about Kaye is that
even in the midst of all the kickboxing & milk-snorting confusion,
she always remained present & willing to roll with the craziness...
totally & utterly herself. The Care Bear jokes are a perfect example--
how much more Real can one keep it? It makes sense, in retrospect,
that she'd teach yoga & meditation so many years later.
The feeling of awe is mutual-- hearing from afar that Kaye had whipped
through her bachelor's degree, took on law school, passed the bar, and BTW
had published a book on interest group advocacy...
& all this blew my mind on the schiz, but the fact that she remained so completely herself
through all of this-- and remained genuinely interested in the writing and insights of her gonzo-bohemian cousin who had published exactly jack shit-- really challenged me to rethink the possibilities of the work I was doing.
I remember those times when we were kids, and had hounded Grandma or one of our aunties to take us down to the pool. We were young yet, and didn't have much in the way of money or services to offer... I suspect we relied on our yowly catlike persistence to convince them.
In any case, our guardians were often generous enough to escort us down to the apartment complex pool, where we would either toe in shivering or run up shrieking over the shimmering water, nose plugged, to explode like sixty-pound cannonballs into the pool.
One of the first things we'd hear was "Now you Kids-- no Wrastling in the pool!"
This struck us as insane: aquatic whoop-ass was exactly the reason we'd goaded the adults into bringing us down here. All our blows were slowed considerably, you couldn't land on your ass, and in the pool we were actually strong enough to body slam each other in ways that didn't play out in normal gravity.
Marco-Polo was acceptable-- shrieking was not. These rules seemed arbitrary and strange at the time.
Now, as adults, I think we can all agree that the screams of children--
inspired by whatever emotion-- trigger a primal-threat response in us
which does not distinguish between a child being abducted, flayed,
or simply getting live in the shrieking run-up to a truly righteous cannonball.
To the nerves of the mature adult, this noise detracts in alarming ways
from the fresh air & relaxation they might have envisioned when finally agreeing
to accompany a small pack of caffeinated youngsters to what would soon amount
to a giant aquatic WWF ring.
& yet it must also be understood that this very primal shriek--
in many ways akin to the roar a great cat emits before making a meal of us
(to tenderize our flesh, we must assume), or the whoop-whoooop-whooooiiiip!
of howler monkeys keeping it real in the treetops--
is every bit as essential to the Truly Righteous Cannonball as the run-up,
the nose-plug, and the leap.
We hope that future generations will work out this quandary-of-the-ages,
which has likely persisted since homo sapiens' children figured out how to
make each other scream.
It's interesting that adults (who aren't presently raising kids)
require relative quiet in order to feel safe. These primordial alarms
are programmed into us, though, aren't they? Should a horde of barbarian marauders
appear on the horizon, we'd be powerless to stop them. We just weren't throwing that kind of cannonball at that age.
Grandma may or may not have turned to us and said,
"Didn't I tell you kids? They must have followed the sound of your blood-curdling screams."
We are fortunate, though, that Grandma now remembers only good things about the grandkids. She's not suffering from acute memory loss, it's just that her memory has painted the past some shade of sepia gold. She can't even remember her own children acting up. In her mind now, the decades-long process of raising all those kids, and wrangling their kids-- in and out of pools, through the whirlwind visits and cannonballs and forbidden wrastling throwdowns-- was more or less peaches.
& it's not like she doesn't remember the handful of people on her Horse's Ass list (& that is the actual name of Grandma's Shit List... it's presently resting on the endtable right next to her chair).
She will remind you weekly how when her father lost the farm during the Depression, an uncle got her dad a job in the Twin Cities, but demanded a hefty kickback every week.
Sitting there in her living room chair in the last of the day's light, she becomes karma's messenger... a reminder of how much we have to share, & the tragic splinter in the memory of a woman who does not even remember the pain of delivering six children, but recalls precisely a time when a blood relative saw more advantage in fleecing his kin than in protecting them from an amoral, profit-driven world.
There's a creative quickening happening here, as Kaye & DJ & I engage our mutual need to carve stories out of the myriad. We'll discover them in ways we never expected, reflected through each other's eyes, and I truly look forward to watching that unfold here.
& if I remember correctly, the All-Time Righteous Cannonball Award goes to Denny Marv. Cousins?
Peace.
