On his 17th birthday, Sam still doesn't think he has made any choices. 

Sam and Sara reenact a scene from five years ago when he was short enough to rest his head on my new brides shoulder. 

Cities were built to frame kids. 

My town. It is always a few minutes from perfect here. 

Sam and Sara. I will let them speak for themselves. 

Sam and Sara emote for parody of emotion, but they are caught in the accidentally real. 

This is Harriet and she is entering puberty. For her yearnings, she suffered a broken wing. For her broken wing, she suffers you. 

These children are a few seconds of right now staring at you from behind a thousand years. 

What is this! Extravagance, a maelstrom of visual pleasure made permanent by a thousand hours of patient stitch after patient stitch. It defies you, who cannot make 6 peanut butter crackers without noises of impatience. 

The hallucination of a Japanese kimono in the middle of the prairie. 

This Japanese kimono would make you famous in any house in the world. 

You can refrain from touching, but not from being touched by egrets that live only in the eye of a Japanese woman who has touched creation itself in her infintesimal silken threads. 

This kimono hangs in a gallery in the town of Wabasha Minnesota. It is a quaint home for something that is mute and royal. 

Sara makes a beauty statement without saying a word. She is a flower ever blooming, an anthem of beauty in the colors of snow and gold. 

Sam confronts an alien life form. He wonders if there are verbs in its language. 

At a conference of intellectuals, it is hard to see the person in the pose. 

I was walking with Mart, the ex-Prime Minister of Estonia, in Uptown, which is an urban shopping center in Minneapolis. Suddenly this woman began talking to Mart in Estonian. They had known each other years ago in Estonia. 

This is Mart Laar, the ex Prime Minister of Estonia, with Sam and Sara. He came to my house for dinner when we picked him up at the airport for a conference. At the dinner he discovered we both had the same Weber grill, and liked Laphroaig single malt whiskey. 

A whole generation has become stones, and finally equal, impossible of words, cold to ambition, in memory only do they ever burn. 

My mother has become a clean stone in a grassy field, where men who were once boys come to be emptied of the pretense of knowledge. 

We do not know how to embrace our dead. We walk on them, and enact the ritual of photos for someone who is not born yet. Is not being born yet the same as being dead? 

When auto man tries to recapture the romance of the past, he has to create a new past, and shove the present out of the way. But he can, and does, and his date smiles and passers-by feel the romance for a minute. 

This is my father's grave. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Air Force during the war. 

Jeff explores the semiotics of finger puppets in video universe