Family Thanksgiving

Recently we have spent some time with some of the finest people I have ever known.

Last Friday, my son Joey and his wife Andrea.  They shared with us the ultrasound of twin girls soon to arrive.

 

On Wednesday, Gene Cook, Ben, Kathryn and her infant boy Jensen Blackburn came to share lunch.

We enjoyed spending the evening with son Thomas.

 

Thursday we joined Carl and Cindy and their children at their home for the traditional Thanksgiving gathering.

Then on Friday we had a visit with Bill and Youngshin, with Ammon and Elise

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?  (WB Yeats, 1939)

President Barack Obama's inner circle says he remains defiant and unwilling to face the seismic post-election reality.