Photos of My Baby, Taken by My Bro

On Facebook, I titled this photo album My Baby by My Bro - which has a nice ring to it, but then I worried it had twisted, incestuous overtones.  I suppose plenty of women have had babies fathered by their brothers. I can only imagine what my former psychiatrist, a thorough Freudian, Polish Jew who served in the Polish Resistance army back during WWII, would have to say about the thought crossing my mind.  He always thought I believed that my brother was actually a child I had given birth to fathered by my own father.

That's Freudians for you.

Anyway, my brother was in town over Columbus Day Weekend because some football team from Texas was up here for the Monday night game.  He took these head shots, which Velvet needs for his budding acting career.  Nobody knows what Velvet intends to do with said head shots - but I think he looks nice.

He looks a little bit like Jesus in the next one, if you ask me - but then, I'm his mother and was raised in the South where Jesus is always a white guy.  No matter what you think Jesus looks like, however, legend has it that he was a Jew and this kid looks both  this kid not only looks Jewish but in the photo he also looks like he's a thinking peaceful and/or philosophical thoughts while he gazes off into the distance.  In reality, he was probably thinking about his celebrity lifestyle.  On Velvet's Facebook page he says "I'm not a Jew.  I'm Jew-ish."  That's absolutely true since the only Jew in his family background was his paternal grandfather.  That's Jewish enough for Hitler, but here on the Upper West Side, most Jews agree that if your mother's not Jewish, you're not Jewish.  Even if your mother converts, you're still not really Jewish.  It's kind of like being adopted.  Reform Jews hold a different opinion, but from what I've observed, there are plenty of Jews who think Reform Jews don't really count as Jews either.  On the Upper West Side, it's very easy to ask the question: What kind of Jew are you?  Just this weekend, someone I've worked with for a couple of years was surprised to find that I'm not a bit Jewish, which just goes to show you that you never can tell about this stuff.   But I still think Velvet looks like Jesus in this picture, even though his hair is short.

When Velvet was little, we used to call him Mandark after a cartoon character on Dexter's Laboratory.  Mandark was the evil mad scientist.  Here's Mandark today;

Not sure if he's Mandark here or not - but often shows this smirky smile:

It's good to have a Pulitzer prize-winning photographer brother to take pictures of your baby.  It's even better now that my brother can post them directly to his website for immediate access with a password since years ago, I may have waited over a year to see the prints.  And it's good that he gets to travel to New York for work sometimes.  It's especially good when family members like to be together - it doesn't always work out that way.  In fact, it's such a good thing that I'm declaring it Thing of Beauty #60-101.
Velvet himself can be Thing of Beauty #61-101.

This past weekend I was out in the country, not deep in the woods, but fully surrounded by trees and meadows with no neighbors in sight.  The music teacher at the school where I work invited all the teachers out for a "retreat."  It was only me and the arts team - the music teacher, the dance teacher and the visual arts teacher.  Pretty cool, actually.  Fracking is a big issue out there right now since the Oil and Gas companies are itching to get at that pristine countryside.  Fortunately, I didn't know some O&G company representatives had taken over a nearby bed and breakfast, or I'd have probably gotten arrested for slashing their tires.  Without that information, I was able to ponder the nature of phenomenon like Elves and Fairies.

The topic of Angels had come up in the car on the way to the farm, and I shared my view that as energetic beings in an energetic universe, we sometimes brush up against all kinds of energies besides our own.  A vocabulary word to explain some of those other energies is "Angels."  The next morning I sat alone in the woods for a long, long time.  The sun was just breaking through the clouds after a soaking rain in the night.  The leaves rustling in the breeze were as peaceful as the rain on the tin roof over my head in the night.  After a while, my own energy started blending in with the forest, and that's when I figured fairies and elves are vocabulary words that explain the lively, peaceful feeling of sitting by yourself in friendly woods.  I guess some people might be spooked in the woods, and they'd blame fairies and elves - or maybe gnomes.  I'm not sure what gnomes are supposed to eat - but that container of moss could pass for lunch at some of these fancy restaurants where the marketers make such a big deal about the health benefits of eating Raw foods.  For the record, though, the art teacher is not a vegetarian.

The art teacher looked a lot like a little gnome when she was collecting moss to take back to school for the kids. She had on a blue grey hand knit hat and her straight, blonde hair hung around her shoulders when the music teacher took her picture holding up a giant container of moss.  It looked like she was fixing to eat it for lunch - and since she's the kind of person who eats kale and sea weed salad with miso dressing for lunch anyway, the kids would have believed her shining blue eyes and toothy grin were all about food.

I think that people do have energetic affinities that remind us of elves or fairies or gnomes - or of monsters like Jabba the Hutt or worse, as in the case of frackers like Dick Cheney.  I'm glad I was able to tell the music teacher about the Halliburton loop hole that protects fracking fluids from the prying eyes of agencies like the EPA, and about the increase of earth quakes in states like Oklahoma where they've been fracking for a while.  She'd already read about the kids in Pennsylvania who got chemical burns from taking a shower in their own homes.