After seeing my parents, grandparents, and brother off to the airport, I helped my two aunts clean up the house. Had a fairly lively discussion with both of them about many real-world matters, such as employment and real estate.
I requested that we go for a reasonable walk somewhere near running water; I got a couple miles of the St. Vrain Greenway, with a Golden Pond at the far end. I believe the walk helped the digestion quite a bit, and the guilt of multiple overeating even more.
Dinner was relatively modest: a naked salad with some tuna salad and a dollop of guacamole. But yet more local beer. (Pale ales are not really my thing.)
As an exercise in proving that learning is dangerous, I joined my aunts in watching a film about the 13th-century Afghan/Persian Sufi poet named Rumi. (Is that a decent balance between compactness and correctness?) CO-Aunt is apparently quite a fan of his work. Though the film itself relied a bit too much upon reading the poetry to music -- much footage of a recording studio, with the reader and his vaguely Pan-Middle-Eastern band -- I dare say I am quite a bit more informed about who this Rumi fellow was, why he did what he did, and why he is held in high regard. Perhaps they even have some of his work at a book shop near me.
What followed the film -- other than CT-Aunt swearing like a sailor because she couldn't get her electronic boarding pass to print -- was CO-Aunt reading a couple of Rumi's poems to me. I was struck by the apparent conflict between his nearly ascetic expressions of love and his passionate desires for the tangible. I do not generally see desire butting heads with its own lack. CO-Aunt says it reinforces Rumi's ultimate humanity; I say that perhaps I do not read (or listen to) enough poetry.
Conversation flows freely between me and CO-Aunt. I do not know why this is -- it probably has very little to do with the twenty-year age gap between us -- but there is something about our personalities that just seems to mesh. (How can I phrase this in language that is not highfalutin or academic, yet still carefully considered and deliberate without sounding borrowed or unintelligent? Ack, separate problem. Just write, you dolt.) Even conversations with my own mother do not go quite as smoothly and naturally, and I have certainly been cast in her mold.
Like like CO-Aunt, I do not want to be pigeonholed by my age or occupation. We seek to understand. We want a wide variety of experience. We are drawn to those who know what we do not. We are essentially optimistic.
The gibbous moon has passed by the living room window. My eyes are tempted to sleep, and my mind wanders. It is time to stop.
(edited and posted on 2005-07-22)