Tuesday the 15th. Last night Jackson
saw a parrot on the Animal Planet channel sing Yankee Doodle. Jackson
laughed and laughed. This morning he walks into the laundry room holding a
toy stuffed parrot he owns and says "I taught my parrot to sing, want to hear
it?" I said sure. Then, while doing an impression of a high-pitched
scratchy voiced parrot doing a Waylon Jennings southern drawl impersonation,
Jackson sings
Maybe it's just because he gets his sense of humor from me, but I think that's pretty funny stuff. This afternoon Jackson got a haircut, then played with Ben at the playground. They also ran into friends Mark and Patrick Blevins there. This evening we accepted the Ead's invitation to join them for a very nice dinner across town. So did anyone check out Johanna Wandel's website? She is now in Iqaluit on North Baffin Island (you'll find that info on the Talk and Talk Back portion of her site). If you don't know where that is, it's north. Very north. Very, very north. Again, maybe this is just something that I'm interested in, but I am fascinated by places like Iqaluit where people live a day to day life that is so drastically different from the lives we live here. And at the same time, I find it interesting to see how much the cultures of today's world bleed into each other. I recall watching Robert Perkin's One Man's Journey trilogy where he paddled down the Limpopo River in southern Africa and being struck by the contrast of how foreign the people, their lifestyle, and their environment were and the fact that they were wearing American sportswear. It is a very big, very small world we live in. There are the things that stop at borders, whether that dividing line is political, geographic, or religious, and there are those things, some trivial and some very important, that seem to float along above and across those lines. And there are people in Mayberry, reading about people from Germany, living in Ontario, visiting Iqaluit and then sharing that with people from, well, wherever it is that you are at right now.