Now, for the Show N Tell for the week – - -
While first retiring in Arizona and living there for nearly 12 years, I developed a fetish for the Native American Folklore Symbol, the flute player. Commonly known as the Kokopelli.
- Kokopelli is a fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player (often with a huge phallus and feathers or antenna-like protrusions on his head), who has been venerated by some Native American cultures in the Southwestern United States. Like most fertility deities, Kokopelli presides over both childbirth and agriculture. He is also a trickster god and represents the spirit of music[citation needed].
Among the Hopi, Kokopelli carries unborn children on his back and distributes them to women (for this reason, young girls often fear him). He often takes part in rituals relating to marriage, and Kokopelli himself is sometimes depicted with a consort, a woman called Kokopelmana by the Hohokam and Hopi.
Courtesy of Wikipedia. You can read much much more if you so desire, here.Each time I would see a silver work of art that had the Kokopelli I would have to stop and gander and ogle them. So many different styles, so many different designs…and so so expensive when you find them in tourist traps like Tombstone or the gift shops in the cities around the southwest. But, there is an advantageous area in and around Tucson….Old Mexico! And sometimes you could get a good bargain on the Indian Reservation just a few minutes drive from the city –the T’hono Odham Reservation near the San Xavier Mission. Anyway, my fetish grew a bit and started to get out of hand when I’d buy identical items then have to send the duplicate purchases to Irene. I put a quick halt to shopping for more Kokopellis and was satisfied with my collection. But, around this area of Texas, not too many people are seen wearing any Native American items….it’s mostly Cowboy/western and Mexican items—I will wear them occasionally, but not as often as I used to in Arizona. You can read more about my collection with a mouse-over on the pictures I’ve shared here……..
~…end Show N Tell
[scroll below book review for commenting]
I saw this advertised as a Lifetime Movie about a month ago, and it really piqued my interests since it was about a Down Syndrome baby. So, when we were at the book store one day, following the ad on TV…I bought it.
I was disappointed after the first few chapters. It turned out to be a bit of false advertising…yes, it was about a Down Syndrome child, but she wasn’t the main character. In fact, there was hardly anything about what her life was like.
It turned out that it was more or less on the edges of a romance novel. Of which I don’t like. But, then again, I found myself reading and turning the pages; all in hopes of perhaps soon it would lead me to the girl with Down’s and what she was like! Sorely disappointed.
If you like all the romance novelists, and Lifetime movies on television, this book may be for you. The girl with Down Syndrome has a twin brother, and he was raised by the natural mother; the mother [wife] is told by her doctor husband that the twin girl was born dead. And of course, she grieves for many years afterwards only to find out in the decades that follow her stormy romances with other men…[ack!! this stuff isn't for me...] that her daughter IS alive!! But at the beginning, the Down’s baby was taken away upon birth….
It just wasn’t quite what I expected. But I did finish the book, so that tells you something. Of a ‘five star rating’, I’m giving it one and a half.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
by Kim Edwards
