Wouldn't you so much rather buy a pack of gum from these ragamuffins than the 7-11? They also sell cigarettes (and matchsticks).

This year we decided it was important to expose Juniper to a little bit more of her own culture, you know, so she could fully learn to appreciate it ironically. It turns out the totally awesome Dutch Theme Park is just the beginning of the celebration of Dutch culture in Wood's hometown: this past weekend we went to the annual "Tulip Time" festival in Holland, Michigan, a week where tulips line every street in varying shades of vibrant color and you see elderly women checking their mailboxes dressed as nineteenth-century Dutch peasants. At several points throughout the week, the streets are closed and people in Dutch costumes sweep the streets and dance. Despite a lifetime of resentment against the Dutch, Wood's mother bought her Dutch granddaughter the same style of costume she danced in when she was in high school (Isle of Marken). The festival usually drives Wood's step dad to extremes of curmudgeonity, but despite being in the absolute dregs of his third round of chemotherapy, he came with us to enjoy the fine weather and his granddaughter smelling tulips dressed like this:

We decided to start the day with a robust Dutch meal. Now, the only Dutch food I knew before Saturday was the pickled herring and pan-fried livers soaking in maple syrup that my Dutch grandfather frequently slurped down with gusto during my childhood. But for $13.50 I got a mediocre meal of boerenkool stamppot metwurst, groentesope met ballejes, saucizenbroodjes, croquetten and a raisin oliebollen for dessert, served by elderly methodists. One thing I'll say about the Dutch: their food looks exactly the same coming in as it does going out.

We then walked into town, where an appropriate welcome had been prepared for me:

The streets were already filled with Klompen dancers, with their wooden shoes and traditional outfits. The local schools have teams of competitive Dutch dancers much like normal schools have cheerleaders or field hockey teams. The parochial schools even have freshman and j.v. squads. Many of the performers came from homeschooling coalitions. I am so proud of my people. For some of them, even strict fundamentalist private schools are too liberal.

I know what you're thinking: this dude is totally wearing a wig. Nobody looks like that much like the kid on the paint can in real life! But that hair is very real. . . and she does.

This poor girl is thinking: "Man, I just know that asshole is going to make fun of my boyfriend on his blog. . ." I do think this dance move is exactly how Wood was tricked into touching her first penis.

Just as I was taking this picture of how pretty some Dutch men are, the wooden shoe this fellow was wearing went flying and hit some old lady in her eye. That was the highlight of my week.

I think the Mennonites come to Tulip Time just so they can look at all the Dutch people and say, "Jeez, check out all the weirdos!"

This girl is also wearing the Isle of Marken traditional costume. When I showed Juniper this picture, she said, "That's Juney when she's a big girl?" And I responded, "Only if I spend the next fifteen years feeding you a steady diet of fundamentalist Calvinism and saucizenbroodjes. Only then will you have the excuse to be this surly when I dress you up in that costume."

You know those signs from the old days that said,"No Irish Need Apply"? "No Wooden Shoes" is the modern-day equivalent for my people. And expecting you to buy something in order to use the toilet? How could they be so cruel?

The hardest part of our transition from San Francisco to Detroit has been how much driving we have to do here. My 2000 Volkswagen twice sat in our San Francisco garage over four months, and the battery died both times. I had to go down and ask the weird Chinese guys who lived beneath our stairs if they could help me jump start it. I loved walking everywhere. I loved buses. I hate parking. And traffic. And yet we moved to a metro area so dependent on the car that people here speak of pedestrians or public transportation the way one might speak of unicorns or the chupacabra. Metro Detroiters literally do not see pedestrians, perhaps because as part of their undying love for the automobile, they've shoved their heads so far up their own asses that they've simply mistaken the color of their intestinal tract for the burgundy interior of a Mercury Grand Marquis. With a child in my arms, I have had to learn to practice "defensive walking." Still, the other day a guy jumped out of his Navigator and told me he "ought to bitch slap" me for having the audacity to give him a dirty look after he almost hit me turning into the crosswalk where I was legally crossing the street. Wood frequently gets home to describe close calls of almost being hit on her walk home from work. I am less scared of thugs with semiautomatic handguns than I am of some girl from the suburbs text messaging while she turns onto the I-75 North on-ramp without realizing there is a human being there crossing the street.

I will admit I am a bit of fuddy-duddy when it comes to shit like texting. Back when cell phones were just starting to become widespread, I would sit on my porch in Ann Arbor and listen to sorority girls walking past having the most inane one-sided conversations I had ever heard. "Why do they think they are so important that they have to talk to someone while they are walking?" I would ask Wood. See, I do not like talking on the telephone and I would prefer no one ever called me. E-mail is okay, but I would prefer to communicate with owls, or telegrams delivered by plucky street urchins on bikes. Until recently, I would flip off every shitbird I saw texting while they drive on the highway. They certainly wouldn't see it, and it made me feel better. The thing is, I have been seeing so many people texting while driving that I don't even bother anymore. Wood has a co-worker who has been pulled over three times for swerving into other highway lanes. Presuming her drunk, the police let her go when they determined her sober. She has confessed to Wood, however, that each time she was texting. I don't get why anyone would want to write a text message while they drive. Can't they just call? Can't it wait? Are they that eager to prove Darwin right? Sometimes when I look over at a rusted-out mid-80s Plymouth Duster being driven by the kind of woman who gets discovered with six dozen cats in her house passing me on the right at 95 MPH while texting and I think, "Jesus Christ, every day I'm putting my life and the life of my child into the hands of someone like that?"

And then I don't drive for three days.

But there is also the whole other matter of the state of our car's interior. I drove down to Adrian to see my grandfather the other day, but when we went to lunch I made him drive separately because I was too embarrassed to let him sit in our car. Now that the warm weather is back, Juniper's pruno distillery is working overtime, and after a long Michigan winter that shit is going to be some cold-filtered genuine draft. This morning as we drove around the suburbs looking for something to buy Wood for mother's day, Juniper threw a fit in her car seat and I did the only thing I know how to do in that situation: throw her food and pray she shuts the hell up. But this time there was no food. I stopped at Donutville, USA and got her a glazed cake which quieted her down for about four seconds before I looked in the rearview to see her doing that pre-meltdown intake of breath with an exploded doughnut on her lap. It looked like someone had stuck the tiniest stick of dynamite in there. How does a doughnut explode?

I called Wood to complain, and while dialing came within inches of hitting a teenage girl jaywalking across the road.

This morning Juniper and I were walking around downtown and I thought it would be fun to stop in Greektown, where the signage contains enough mythology to fill another one of those damn books. She saw Pegasus, and Zeus, and then she sang a song about the matchbox car she was clutching in her grubby little palm. There is a cheesy little souvenir shop across from the casino that sells the exact same wares as the shops in the Plaka or any heavily-touristed part of Greece. We stopped in to look at the shelves and shelves of mass-produced gods and goddesses. The first thing we saw was a life size statue of Athena, and when I pointed to the head of Medusa on her Aegis and said, "Look June: Medusa!" the shopkeeper angrily hurled some words at me in a thick Greek accent. "Pardon me?" I said.

"That's not Medusa! That is goddess Athena!"

"Yeah, I know, but she has Medusa on her breastplate."

"No, No, no, that's not Medusa. That is Athena."

"Yeah, but Perseus gave Medusa's head to Athena. She wore it as part of her armor. See: snakes. Medusa."

"I am sold out of Medusa."

"But. . ." I then decided against disputing it any further. After all, you should never argue with a professional.

* * * * *

I have spent the last six hours trying to get this mythology book on lulu so that I (and anyone else who wants it) can buy one. I added the text as many requested, but it was an incredible pain in the ass to make it all fit in the lulu template. Now that the work is done, I can honestly say I am very excited about this book and I think the end product will be of a much higher quality than the last one. But it may be awhile before I do another one of these.

If you are interested in purchasing a soft cover printed version of the book, click here. Again, I am not making any money on this whatsoever---this project uses artwork that was not created by me, but by generous and anonymous artists who take so many risks to bring beauty to our streets. I will never accept money for any adaptation of their work. If you buy this book, you are only paying for the costs of printing it.

I am also adding the final versions of each individual page, with text, to a flickr set here.

This one is a bit self-indulgent, and reveals more of my nature as a true dork. But as I wrote a few weeks ago, I have been telling Juniper the stories of the Greek myths. And she loves them. Perhaps the greatest thing about staying home with her is that I control what culture she is exposed to. She is not in some daycare watching a Diego video in constant loop or listening to other little girls talk about Disney princesses and all that. There is a limited window where I can tell her what stories I want to tell her, and where she will beg to hear of Icarus, and Medusa, and Athena with her owl. It's not that I believe this will somehow make her smarter than some aficionado of Dora the Explorer, it's that I hate Diego and Dora and I am selfish. And I enjoy these stories myself unencumbered by the pressures of the academy. I don't have to find some deeper meaning, or translate anything. I can just enjoy these stories with her on a purely childlike level, like I did when I was young. That pure enjoyment was the whole reason I went into studying them in the first place (though the truly-geeky classics nerd in me may whip out a version of this book with the original Greek alphabet---finding images for the letters that did not exist then was kind of challenging). This book is designed to be a jumping-off point for the telling of myths.

I went with the graffiti again, not just because I was able to find so many street art images with scenes from classical mythology, but because I liked the idea of seeing myths not only explicitly in the art of modern city streets, but sometimes implied from the context. In ancient Rome, the walls in the city were covered in graffiti, public art, and images from history and mythology. So, it seems, are our cities, if you look for it.

A is for Athena, the goddess of wisdom
B is for Bellerophon, who tamed Pegasus
C is for Cassandra of Troy, the seer
D is for Dionysus, the god of pleasure

E is for Echidna of the Snakes, the mother of all monsters
F is for the Furies, who tormented Orestes
G is for the Griffins of Scythia, who guarded gold
H is for Helen of Sparta, whose face launched a thousand ships

I is for Icarus, who flew too high
J is for Janus, the god of doorways and change
K is for Kalypso, who kept Ulysses too long
L is for Leda, who loved a swan

M is for Medusa, whose hair was made of snakes
N is for Narcissus, who loved his own reflection
O is for Orpheus, the father of songs
P is for Polyphemos, the Cyclops

Q is for Queen Penthesilea of the Amazons, the only match for Achilles
R is for Rage, the rage of Achilles that sent so many Greeks do their doom
S is for Sisyphus, pushing his boulder uphill
T is for Theseus, who slew the Minotaur

U is for Ulysses
V is for Venus, the goddess of love
W is for the Wiles of Ulysses, who designed the Trojan Horse
X is for Sphinx, who told riddles

Y is for the Yearning of Ulysses and Penelope
Z is for Zeus, the king of all gods

If there is any interest, I'll update this later with a link to a lulu site where it will be available at cost just like the last one. I have two more of these graffiti alphabet books (animals and objects) that I am working on, both of which will be far more accessible than this one.

Helen Levitt

I hate it when there's only two posts between urchins, but I've been busy on a new alphabet book and some other big things that should be posted next week. Have a great Spring weekend.