Sky E-News

This is the metaphor that would give birth to love, just like Milan Kundera predicted.  Or wrote without intentionally predicted.  Would it be better to say narrated?  If he were narrating our lives, if he were the author, and he continued to deny his own authority, then how would we ultimately write ourselves?  My fear was always one of repetition, or rather, afraid of repeating anything.  This is because I was born in a time when the generation before me built a set of values that favored repetitions of work in order to replicate lives of fathers, and these constructions were always falling apart, revealing their cracks everywhere we would look.

I met her in a state I was not born in, a state of both panic and delirium.  Delirium would come to signify that most pleasant forgetting for both of us, and something we would pursue almost to madness.  Panic would drive us there, and delirium offers its own sweet rewards.  In Singapore, eating here had the power to change our lives, and not simply or subtly, but completely, because it was always at the beginning of a night that ended much too late.  At the time, we didn’t think it was an escape from history, but it certainly wasn’t a history lesson we would gladly speak out loud.

There were very few times that talking would leave me breathless to a point where I could not do anything else.  But she did ask, during one dinner, if I had considered how the repetitions of the fathers lead to how we learned to love?  At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous idea, or at least a very uncomfortable one, and nothing to talk about on a night we were playing in.  Do we play in history like a great sandbox?  Or is it possible that we play in it like a sandbox without realizing it’s an ocean that is losing its own grip on the very forces that keep water molecules together?  And this unbearable lightness may not be the beginning of our troubles at all, but the end, and that the end of troubles is also the end of love?

In this part of the country, the Southwestern desert, we are just now coming upon the perfect weather for a family barbecue.  And because it is now the end of the summer season, families are finding that there are many bbq grills on sale, allowing them to upgrade, or to just purchase different models for different purposes.  Nothing beats the flavor of using a real charcoal grill, but nothing beats the convenience of a gas grill.  The inexpensive alternatives and options have made it so that people will have the freedom and the choice for their particular backyard party.

Preparing for a backyard meal can be time-consuming, depending on how creative the recipes are going to be, and once the grill is hot, parents often need to find ways to keep children occupied.  There are many games and activities that will keep the young ones occupied while you are preparing the perfect meal, and to keep them safe from the heat of the grill.  My sister’s favorite way to keep her kids occupied is by creating a treasure hunt.  This holds their interest for long than games such as “Duck-Duck-Goose”, and she finds that she can place the treasure items far from the grill.  This game came in handy during her son’s five year birthday party, as she managed to prepare food for twenty other five years, and they were kept busy and excited during the pre-meal stages.

For her older daughters birthday party, she created a different kind of game, a bit like Trivial Pursuit, with balloons.  The night before she wrote questions on tiny strips of paper, blew up the balloons and stuck the questions inside.  The girls then popped the balloons, and if they could answer the question, they remained in the game.  This was not only exciting in that their was a prize for the winner, but popping balloons is a terrifying activity for some, and it kept the girls occupied and entertained while my sister was grilling their hot-dogs and hamburgers.  These backyard games are great for keeping kids busy while you are working in the kitchen, and standing over the grill.