Past updates
Hello, friends. Here I am at the start of a three-day weekend, and today's priority, determined by my bird Sunny, is going to be: my bird Sunny. He consented to come out of his cage when I got up and gave me a long affectionate serenade. I petted him a little and discovered that his head is full of pinfeathers, the stiff prickly state of new feathers growing in. Birds greatly appreciate the help of a friend, human or avian, in preening those new growths.
I let Sunny out again later and gave him the requested scritches, and I will probably spend some more scritching time with him later today. I might be able to get a few other things done in between.
Meanwhile it is, indeed, at least partly sunny today. I turned off the lamp closest to the birdcage, thinking that there was enough sunshine to save a bit of energy. The sun promptly went behind the clouds. (Which is a very funny thing to say, really; it isn't the sun that moves at a whim, but the clouds.) I turned the lamp on again, and lo, the sunshine returned.
I have it figured out now.
Not always sunny
We have had snow twice this week, but in both cases it amounted to nothing but wet streets. It was pretty, at least, as it fell.
On the other hand, I have also seen the first flower shoots, daffodils planted by a small public garden that belongs to the Roman Catholic archdiocese. They're not blooming yet, but yesterday I saw the beginnings of buds swelling at their tips while I was on my way to work.
I also saw the homeless man who sleeps on the sidewalk by the parking garage, over a vent where steam rises. I think of Dwight, the homeless man who befriended me, who helped me the last time I moved house, who died of exposure in January 2020, and I wonder how many people we've lost this winter.
Yes, I want to be a wizard
I've been re-reading some of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, some of my favorite books in this lifetime. I was 16 when the first book, So You Want to Be a Wizard, was published in 1982; I think it had been out for a few years before I read it, after trying and failing to get into it a couple of times. There are now eleven books in the series and the twelfth is underway.
The Young Wizards series is Young Adult fiction before Young Adult was really a label, and it's not much like what's on the YA shelves today. It's also a story about wizards that's very unlike (and long pre-dates) another very popular wizard series. The two main characters were children in the first book; as of the most recent one, they're still in their teens. But it's fiction that can satisfy an adult reader who likes fantasy and/or science fiction, as it straddles the genre lines. There are no love triangles, no dystopias, and no vampires, not even a breath of romance until the most recent books; instead, there are Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez, two very ordinary kids who each stumble across a book that turns out to be a wizard's manual. It's full of spells and information about the universe, but none of that is accessible unless you are willing to take the Wizard's Oath:
Taking the oath unlocks a series of wonders for Nita: a defensive spell against the kids who bully her at school, a conversation with the rowan tree in her front yard, and a meeting with Kit, who soon becomes her working partner and best friend. But it also exposes them--and anyone who takes the Oath--to the enmity of the Lone Power, the being that invented death and entropy and keeps working to spread them, necessitating the existence of wizards to keep beating entropy back.
Nita and Kit have many adventures tackling the Lone Power, and the cast of the series expands to include their parents, Nita's little sister Dairine, Kit's big sister Carmela, other wizards on and off Earth, and the unforgettable ed'Rashtekaresket, the Master of all sharks. (One of my top favorite characters of the whole series, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that.)
On a thematic level, I think the series has much in common with the works of Tolkien. While there are no Elves in the Young Wizards universe (so far), Duane's cosmology bears a strong resemblance to Tolkien's creation myth, the "Ainulindale": The One creates the Powers That Be, those Powers help to create the universe, and then one of those Powers goes Rogue. And like Tolkien's legendarium and other words, the series is fundamentally concerned with the use and misuse of creative power. Tolkien's work was based on and fuelled by his creation of the Elvish languages; Duane's wizardry is powered by the Speech, the magical primordial language that creates reality. To speak the Oath enables access to that language; to use it requires an ethic of telling the truth and a willingness to try persuasion before coercion, to greet every other being, whether apparently sentient or not, as a fellow creature with dignity and agency. And to ally with the Lone Power, as some wizards occasionally do, is to forfeit that creative power forever, for "wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart".
At the moment in my reading, Nita and Kit are on Mars, not together but with two different groups of friends (including a whale), and it's almost time for lunch, here and now. As the wizards say in greeting and farewell, dai stiho.
Rembrandt's wife is Merri-Todd Webster