Moscow Mule Part 1

This is the original London Bridge, deconstructed and reconstructed across the ocean in Arizona, spanning Lake Havasu, created by damming the Colorado River.

Desert sky, dream beneath the desert sky, rivers run but soon run dry, we'll need new dreams tonight.

We've been there three times, three summers, and each time the lake has sunk further into the ground, the sun melting us as we cross the bridge looking for food, copper walls of the canyon in the distance. It is impossible to lay outside, walk outside, do anything but swim or stay indoors. I suppose that's why most people head south from Canada during the winter, not the summer.

Las Vegas, California, is just over a month away...

Jule keeps asking to go to the Bahamas. He plans to be an artist when he grows up, and live in the Bahamas. Caleb wants to be a rock star and an actor, and live in Hawaii. It's sad, but chances are they'll change their minds and go to Canadian universities like we all end up doing, become professionals, and slave away at semi-satisfying careers in frozen cities until they're old.

I want to live someplace tropical, someplace beside the water.

I want this, I want that, I want to go to Greece, I want to surf in Portugal, I don't want to do my paperwork, I want to tear down my house and start from scratch. I want my hair to have body, as it does in hot, humid environments. I want to stop getting pimples now that I'm over 30 - it's ridiculous. I am self-centered and cruel. We Mennonites are all so painfully self-conscious, a culture in its adolescence. My grandparents were like babies, obeying their elders, trying to please; my parents rebelled in grandiose ways, then got caught and repented, towed the line; my generation is the first to actually try to find its own way, figure things out, become reasonable adults. We're the teenagers. Maybe our children will be normal, will grow up.

My father's first cousin is Miriam Toews, of "A Complicated Kindness"; I'm convinced that my mother is a minor character in that book. I expect she knows nothing of me, though, as I was not allowed to know my father, as I was conceived out of wedlock. My mother's first cousin, Christina Penner, denies being gay though she just published a novel about a young Mennonite woman who is bisexual and struggles with telling her traditionally religious parents that she is having sex with her dead husband's mother. I wish we would just get over it, just come out with it, just be.

I was going to tell you about the Moscow Mule that I made tonight, a Vodka Special only with ginger ale instead of Sprite, but I have to pick Caleb up from karate, now.

Until tomorrow, then.