Above are a bunch of cows grazing in the Wales countryside. When we lived in England, his mother died and I saved up my own measly earnings to buy us $420 tickets to see an Oasis / Foo Fighters concert in Cardiff. Two of our favorite bands. Gave us something to look forward to after the funeral.
And when I found out some bullshit about my then-recently deceased father - bullshit that incidentally fell in line with what the novel I was writing was about (it's the same novel you've heard me talk about, it defines me, I will shank anyone who doesn't like it if it ever gets published) we impulsively purchased flights to San Francisco so I could go to the bars that the Beat writers used to hang out at and we went to City Lights Bookstore where I bought Queer by William S. Burroughs (I want to live like him in another life - I've said that before) and The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, which he wrote over a span of 72 hours without any sleep, just fueled by drugs and alcohol - that's my 2nd ultimate goal in life, to do something really bad ass like that, writing-wise (my first goal, of course, involves my daughter). Seeing the hoodrats above taking pics near the Golden Gate Bridge made my husband and I's hearts melt. We wish we could take all of our hoodrat nephews and neices to see all sorts of iconic things all around the world. Surely y'all remember we're from the 'hood. So we have a soft spot for hoodrats. We sat there like creepers, staring, in awe of these gangster-ish homies barely able to contain their excitement over where they were... Sigh. I still hope those dudes have many more trips like these to look forward to in their lifetimes.
And (besides our trip back to San Antonio in November and our impending move back there) we always look forward to the day that our child(ren) will journey off to see the lands they were named after... That's our thing. We name our kids after places we've visited - making sure, of course, that those places sound at least a little bit like human names. We do it anticipating they will visit those places themselves one day and become super worldly people. Our daughter is named after the city of Siena in Tuscany. And I put up the picture above cuz if this second baby would've made it into the world we would have named it Mtarfa... I'm fucking kidding. There's nothing wrong with that proper noun or the language it's derived from, but it kinda looks like one of the frantic fucked up strings of letters that I type out in the headings of my emails. But if it was a girl, we thought about naming her Valetta, which is the capital of Malta, which is where the sign in the pic is from; or, if it was a boy (which I whole-heartedly think it was), we thought about giving him the middle name Roman cuz we've been to Rome and the name sounds bad ass. Maybe Sienna will wanna travel to those places too, knowing she might have had a sibling with a namesake from Valetta or Rome, and knowing her sibling would've probably wanted to go there themselves one day...? At least that's something for us, and Sienna, to look forward to, even if the little baby didn't make it.
Now we've gotta figure out what to look forward to in the midst of this new tragedy...
