'Little Fractals on the Hillside'

Heard from an internet buddy who is visiting with her son, I think, and grandkids in Oregon. She lives in London and grew up somewhere in post-War Germany. She's very active, as I understand, in developing programs that bring Death into our lives, as a natural and beautiful, perchance, closing act.

An antidote, perhaps, to the anger that many of us fear about needing to end the party ... like the Colonial poet cried:

A fig to thee, Oh, Death.

I toast her work!

In any case, I was particularly taken (I've just arisen from the Land of the Great God Sopor and am still soporous if not still stupefous ... or just stupid-fous) by the request from her son's cohort that she (we aging folk) move nearer him .... to Oregon? ... and her response about her life being back in UK. The Fractal part that came in J's life still HAS life even if its newer model has become its own. M and I are back at our place in Virginia ... one kid and grandchild coming for a bit but right now a 70+ yo friend and her 24 yo granddaughter are our only guests ... oh, and GuntherDog. The kid has had a rough ride with her parents (I've known her Dad and GrandDad for 47 years)  and oozes into the orbit of her Grandma between grad school semesters. In the midst of a quiet dinner,  I commented about what I thought was a quotidian antipathy between children and their parents ... suggesting (a la Loewald, Gibran, and many  others) that part of 'the job' of kids in growing up is to make the parents progressively irrelevant. Loewald said it stronger. Something about his belief that 'on the plane of
psychic development, killing off the parents is a developmental necessity. Fuck the Buddha on the


road .... the parental functions need be superceded ... Y'gotta learn how to put spoon to mouth, clean your own butt, balance your own checkbook, read your own stories ... and ... yes! ... eventually write your own stories. 

"Well the parents don't become entirely irrelevant," the non-M Grannie opined.

Sure, sure and OK ... not ENTIRELY irrelevant ... but pretty much so.

Irrelevant was the word that worked for me. I was refering to, I suppose, relevance as a set of characteristics that have past, present and future attached to them. I live in Philadelphia (well, thereabouts). When do I follow the spawn into their own living fractals? Do I?

I do want to believe that I'm more than my sore back and Funny Old Grandpa who will teach Chloe how to throw a pailful of water at the beach, today, and the guy who rewrites songswith clever lyrics.

Hey! Long live life in London, Philadelphia and God bless Tiny Tim and all the little spawn wherever they've built their own places of relevance!

BTW ... I tossed in this notion of Fractals and some of you may have never looked at such geometric oddities.  Fractals -- loosely speaking -- are geometric constructions with a curious quality. No matterhow much you magnify them and wherever 'in the graphic picture' you search, you keep
finding new versions of the same template. Some of them that you'll find online look like ferns where each sub-piece looks like the whole picture. Get thee to Google, and ogle pics of Fractals. They'll
(maybe) blow your aging mind!


Life reproducing itself?


Maybe not the most beautiful but among the cleanest in lines is Sierpinski's Triangle. I'll see if I can
find a picture.

An afterthought. I'm pretty confident that the grown Grand-daughter at dinner has noidea that her Grandpa was one of the folk who thought through some of the convergence theorems that make the
construction of these figures possible .....