Musing on ancestry prompts a bout of traveling

Last night I made a spur of the moment decision to make a road trip. I drank coffee, and fed my head with lectures-on-CD about Whitman and Vikings and Symphonies and it was good. But I felt kind of stuffed with art, as if I'd just been wrestled to the floor of some art gallery by my own consent and now a part of me was protesting that ManRayissoooosexist! (That was one weird thought I had. Another was that I had a small pyramid of building blocks neatly stacked in my head and all I needed to experience fulfillment in life was to maintain an awareness of them.) I had to intersperse listening to lectures with music. A program by Red Priest called "Pirates of Baroque." Some song on Ipower 92.1 with the lyrics "you choose you choose" which was, I think, #5 in a list at around 9:45 pm last night. No, that is not enough information. Rolled in around 2 am, the time of the building blocks thought, listening to songs from Radiohead's "Kid A" and feeling sort of mathematical and "detached." My sister , who maintains a unique sleeping schedule which corresponds roughly to European time, was up. This morning, after reading an e-mail from someone born and raised in California, she had a question on translation: "How do you say shut your pie hole?" "Well, I think cerrar is to close, but people say 'cayate' when they mean shut up...maybe you could say 'hueco de pastel?'" She said "I wonder how that would go over in Spanish Harlem. By the way, some of our ancestors were Huguenots who went to the Netherlands and lived in Harlem, way back when. And some owned land on Staten Island. Too bad we didn't hang on to that." I said, "Maybe some other greedy relative got it!"