I just finished Blake's first Hallowe'en costume. Boy, I'm glad he can't talk, because I'm sure that if he were blessed with language he'd leave me in no doubt as to the crappiness of my sewing. It seems that I have a talent for puppetry but not baby bee costumes. The Boy likes it, but the Boy likes to make music with "found sounds" so I can't be certain that it's any good.

Still, between a mute baby and a kooky spouse, it's not like I need to please anyone else. I should just quit while I'm ahead.

This afternoon Blake & I accompanied my parents to a(nother) family funeral. (The Boy has been around for seven of these (4 in the past year) and wants to know why everyone in my mother's family is circling the drain. I have no answer for him.)

It was a nice enough service, I suppose. I didn't really know my mother's cousin, just the half-baked rumours and scraps of gossip that get passed along through the family telegraph. I heard she was a drinker. I heard she used to be a model. I heard she had a sulphurous tongue. Of course the eulogy wasn't terribly enlightening; from it I learned that she loved animals, butterflies, her common-law husband and the autumn. I mean, it's not like I went there expecting to hear an insulting speech that laid her doubts and mistakes bare for the world to see. And yet I think I would've liked to hear from someone who knew her more than just the two months at the very end of her life, the two months when cancer moved through her like an invading army.

I'm lucky that I have articulate, kind people in my life. I'm sure that when I die attempting re-entry in a homemade rocket ship, I can expect a eulogy from someone who can express something about me beyond trite clichés.

She loved reading. She loved her son and spent many happy hours just being his mom. She liked to dress up in black corsets and curse the local livestock. And she loved to dance.

Today's helping of Blake:

During the funeral I had to take him out due to some loud hooting. We spent the rest of the service in the back, the place where all the coats were kept and people could slip in without disturbing the mourners. Blake crawled everywhere and got into everything; fortunately there wasn't very much to get into in the clean funeral home. At one point he crawled beneath the coats and started pulling a long black number over his face. I think he was disappointed that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how widely he grinned, no one wanted to play peekaboo.

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 10/27/2004 09:45:00 p.m.