We're on our way to New York! Well, I'm waiting in line for a shoeshine at O'Hare, but excitedly. We bought lunch anonymously for three soldiers a little while ago in a concourse restaurant. Going home makes us feel happy.

Laura and I are notorious—well, at least at our house, where everything we do is notorious—for procrastinating when there are things we need to have framed. That's why it's a miracle that, a mere month after their purchase, we've taken the prints of our photographs from Bill Wadman's 365 Portraits project [Laura] [Bill] to the framing shop. [Hi, Ken!] [Hi, Derryl!]

Wednesday evening I picked Laura up from work IN OUR NEW USED CAR and we headed north to visit the big famous framing guys. Turns out their master framer is such a master that he only works from about 10:00 to 4:30, which meant we were never going to get there when Laura could come along. So from the recesses of her brain, Laura dredged up a memory of a little art gallery/framing shop near the parking lot where we used to pick up our Zipcar. It was closing in on 8:00 pm by the time we pulled up, and though it was well past the posted hours the front door was open and the proprietor was inside painting. She welcomed us, presented us with some very interesting and attractive options for frames and mattes, and presented us with a total that was less than we'd expected. Altogether a delightful experience.

So then I whipped out the other item of mine that needed framing: a limited edition lithograph (number 1 of 50, in fact!) of a Kenn Brown work that was an incredibly generous gift from the artist himself. (The website for Mondolithic Studios, Kenn's venture with partner Chris Wren, is under construction just now, but you've definitely seen their work.) I'm embarrassed to say that it had taken me nearly four years to get the thing framed, but it's going to look unbelievably cool, and I couldn't be happier.

I keep forgetting to post that my virtual contribution to March's CD Mix of the Month club was Life Is Good, an affirmation tinged with darkness.

(The story so far.)

I have quite a backlog of little items I've made notes about that I've meant to blog over the past couple of months, and maybe today or soon I'll start getting to most of them. Though before I get to the one immediately at hand, I just have to note that outside right now is raging the SECOND snowstorm of spring.

Now to the main monkey business. Laura and I are heading to New York tomorrow to spend a lazy weekend. The prime motivator of our trip is to see our friend Laura Peterson's new dance program Electrolux, at DNA (280 Broadway). You should come too. Seriously. Go buy tickets. The run starts tonight and ends Sunday.

Electrolux might look something like this rehearsal footage:

Or this showing:

Laura's previous show, I Love Dan Flavin, was beautiful, brutal, and awe-inspiring. As we watched (and we went twice), we could see the dancers' feet becoming bloody. Check this out (though you'll have to imagine the Kraftwerk soundtrack that is missing from the video):

We're going Saturday. If you miss out, you won't have to kick yourself because I just did it for you.

Spotted in Chicago, and photographed by Laura's iPhone, at the corner of Diversey Parkway, Racine Avenue, and Lincoln Avenue:

And then, for good measure, they break your kneecaps.

I guess giving away free ebooks is only news when HarperCollins does it, not Tor or Ace or especially Baen.

Epidode #51 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Donald William Shunn II remembers the original model (1936-2008).

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=51

See also shunncast.

My deepest thanks to everyone who posted or called or sent cards on the occasion of my father's passing. (Well, to everyone but the ones who tried to use the opportunity to reassure me of the reality of the afterlife. Bad time to make your dubious point.) The sympathy and concern were very touching and very much appreciated.

Laura and I returned Saturday from the funeral, which was held in Kaysville, Utah, the town where my parents have lived for 28 years. The funeral was a curiously joyful affair for the family, though punctuated of course by bouts of deep grief. My mother seemed to be doing better than just about anyone else, as if the burden of my father's long illness had at last been lifted. Relatives—and I have a lot—and friends came from far and wide, and many, many folks from the ward where I grew up dropped in for the viewing and/or service as well.

It was hard to walk from one end of the church to the other without being delayed an hour by people wanting to talk. I enjoyed seeing everyone and catching up, but this was also unfortunate in that it prevented me from getting to the men's room before the funeral service began. As a pallbearer, I didn't have a chance to slip away at the end of the service, either. So it was off to the cemetery in a limo for the interment and then back to the church, before sweet relief could be obtained. A short four hours.

My two brothers, Tim and Lee, spoke at the funeral, as did a former bishop who is a close friend of the family. My brothers' remarks were excellent, though I frequently found myself wishing I'd known the person they were talking about better. My brothers are Siblings Five and Six, which means they grew up in a different Family Era from the four oldest, and very different from My Era, the Epoch of the Firstborn.

The former bishop who spoke is someone I knew very well when I was a teenager and a lost young man in my early twenties. He too spoke about a man I didn't know well, but whose generosity of spirit I certainly witnessed from afar. My father had a gift for connecting with troubled and disadvantaged youths, though in my case a different set of expectations probably interfered with that ability. (For my listing as a pallbearer in the printed program, I deliberately chose to be called "Donald William Shunn II," a name I have not used for well over a decade, probably because it gives me a claim on a connection no one else has with him. I sure would have liked to have connected over a beer, though.)

I cried several times during the service, though not when I was wondering what was wrong with me that I could never connect with the man the way everyone else seemed to have, and certainly not during the part's of the bishop's remarks that seemed directed explicitly at we four scattered siblings (a solid fifty percent of the total) who have broken the celestial family chain by removing ourselves from the Mormon faith. During those interminable parts I gritted my teeth and clenched my sphincters.

I was very glad to have Laura with me, though she was rather discomfited to have seen my father's dead body lying in its casket dressed in Mormon temple robes.

My extended family is vast enough when you count only blood relatives, but to this dense tree must be added the couple who took my father under their wings in his early twenties, after both his parents has died. This was the couple I knew growing up as Grandpa and Grandma Stone, who between them had twelve children of their own—eleven from previous marriages, and one together. At the Relief Society luncheon that followed the interment, I spent an inordinate amount of time greedily lapping up stories about my father from one of the eldest of these, Stephen Stone. Stephen also told me what it was like to grow up in the house of his father, a respected psychologist and minor Mormon celebrity. It was a side of Grandpa Stone I'd never heard before, and the parallels to me and my father were downright eerie. I had to wonder if my father hadn't picked up a good number of his early parenting techniques from Grandpa Stone.

At a Mormon funeral, particularly one filled with people you haven't seen in nearly two decades, religious faux pas are bound to be made. There was the older man (another former bishop!) who mildly scolded me for wearing a beard, and who, when told we lived in Chicago, could only reminisce about the time he looked down from the top of the Sears Tower and thought, "Look at all those people! So many to convert!"

That drew only an appalled stare from me and Laura, but my proudest moment actually came at graveside shortly after my father's interment. The bishop who had spoken at the funeral, a man I really do love and respect a great deal, and who I'm sure many times heard my father agonize about my apostasy, held me by the arm and, after expressing his sympathy for my loss, fixed me with an intense stare and said, "It's true, you know. Deep down you know it, don't you."

"I don't," I said, and as he swept me into a tight embrace (was he afraid to look me in the eye at that moment?), I went on, "Cal, I'm like my father that way. I can't say something that I don't believe, and I don't believe it."

"Think about it for me from time to time," he said.

"I think about it all the time," I said.

He nodded. "We can still be friends, though, right?"

"Of course," I said.

That evening, because my father had come out of one of his final fogs long enough to ask if Mom would still be all right after the $2,000 pizza party (okay, maybe he hadn't emerged all the way from that fog), we had a raucous pizza party at my parents' house. Laura and I are on a diet that doesn't permit pizza, but we had some anyway, and it was good.

Some words that are meaningful to me just now, from an address by "Great Agnostic" Robert J. Ingersoll at a child's grave in 1882:

Every cradle asks us "Whence?" and every coffin "Whither?" The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions just as well as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful ignorance of the one, is as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words of the other. No man, standing where the horizon of a life has touched a grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and tears.

May be death gives all there is of worth to life. If those we press and strain within our arms could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. May be this common fate treads out from the paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate. And I had rather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where love is not. Another life is nought, unless we know and love again the ones who love us here.