too much to list this past week in Walla Walla where I go eternally searching for my lost youth.

lyli and scarleht now say:

"here ya go!"
"pillow, pellow, pI-llow" - for this one lyli's tongue nearly touches her nose
"gramma" "gran-papa" (although Gramma tends to mean either depending on context)

my mother has been signing up a storm with them as well as sent me packing with three American Sign Language videos to pore over in all my spare time (read 3a.m.).

my father plays with them in the mornings, reading books and laughing, the wrinkles around the corners of his eyes sketching out my future. he is so tired when he gets home at night from the store. I worry about both my parents.

My parents have been watching them together and alone for a bit here and there while I go work at my pop's bookstore and run errands and get out to try to breathe or write or search some soul or have a cold beer and look for faces I used to know around the foreign bars, alienated within my own eggshell. Willow, the old gray cat of my childhood is withering; she has now lost control of her bowels and stays outside most of the time. Her meow is quite loud and grating as she can no longer hear what it sounds like in order to fine tune a few things. Rascal, my old Australian shepherd is dead and her enormous offspring Brando is too clumsy and lick-crazy around the girls to be any fun for them. They just stare at him and then cry if he comes near. Oh well, maybe next time.

I do the dance, wine tasting, girls downtown, stares, stopping every other person to allow gawking at such magnificent beauty (the girls too I'm sure). Surely the goddess Diana came down and kissed the eyelids of these two 'cause I've never been that beautiful in my life and Stephanie is beautiful but in a different way. Anyway... the Walla Walla social dance I dip my toe into and shudder at. I enjoy ending sentences with prepositions. Ha! I got a C on one grammar test and Ds and Fs on all the others and I'm a writer.

But seriously, how broke back mountain is it to cliche yourself to death in a small town when you could be working to foster an egalitarian sustainable organic biodiesel biodiesel biodiesel community? I digress.

I guess.

I am enchanted by wheat. John and I drive through the fields, twins asleep in the rear, snoring. We continue a wide-ranging philosophical conversation that has swelled over a couple days and will continue for a few more. We touch on romantic love, sense of place, literary criticism, current events, old yarns, highschool sexcapades, those worthless carcasses of testosterone and booze we used to drag around the haybales milking the system for all we could and giving back insolence and sometimes art. Now we know our folly and call it blind vanity but move on selfishly anyway despite this knowledge. We eat a torta and a Mexican fish I think is called Tilapa(?) Time achieves this brilliant haze it always has for me with him, an incandescence blurs the edges of my vision and consciousness, thoughts becoming tangible, concretions merging into vague conceptions, doors opening, dream-petals unfolding. The wonder of a friendship without possibility of failure, the endless kind that authors sometimes try to capture in 7oo page novels that have to be translated into English for our monolingual dumbtongues. I revel in the bliss of intelligent banter. Too often it seems my tongue is tied to trivial, menial matters and details which do not deserve my attention. I believe that the little shit works itself out as long as you know how to pull the strings.

Stephanie misses the girls terribly. They talk about her 6 to 12 times a day. It is sad and amazing to experience such things.

Today we went to visit Phyllis and Bob Pulfer, John's grandparents. Phyllis used to be the head of the Democratic Party for the state of Washington, she's been on the Human Rights Commission, she's spearheaded hundreds of projects locally and nationally and is now in her late seventies or early eighties (?) and has been blind for many years. She is also the mother of twins, John's mother being one of them. She and Bob had four kids and then had twins (that's right, and you think one or two are hard). We talked about parenting and kids and trains and magnets and I tried to explain to Phyllis some of the ASL signs the girls know. I was trying to tell her how to sign take turns: you make an L with the index finger and thumb of your right hand and then flip it over from palm up to palm down, your thumb indicating two options and your index finger pointing straight forward. But Phyllis, it was obvious to me, couldn't remember what the letter L looked like! So I re-explained it as a kid imitating a toy gun with her hand and she locked on target just fine. Then she placed her hands over mine and felt while I signed and I guided her hands into the proper shapes. It was quite amazing. I can't stop thinking about Helen Keller and language acquisition and synapses and shit. Whew.

God, what else? Just sealed a deal to get three table-top printing presses. My friend Jade is our intern at the bookstore this quarter to get our old Chandler and Price press up and running. The site is just beginning but tune in to Ampersand Printing soon to get a glimpse of this clandestine undertaking / artistic endeavor / fledgling business. Should be fun times ahead.

Troubleshooting my father's new laptop, picked out a nice digital camera for him while we were here. I'm jealous, now he's got a nicer camera and a nicer computer than we do. We're gonna have to upgrade again.

Tomorrow afternoon we will rent a big ass car, hopefully not that fucking Yukon again. Horrible gas mileage and I end up driving 85 miles per hour 'cause it feels like 35. God people are morons. Perhaps we will dine in Yakima or at that little trout place on White Pass... time will tell. Definitely gonna hit the taco bus on the way out of town. Maybe get some onions. mmmmmm. onions. Thanks for tuning in. Sorry I didn't post anything for a bit. Leave more comments and I will!