SIBSAB XI – 2017

The first weekend in May, I got together with my three siblings for our annual SIBSAB—the once a year event when just the four of us go off by ourselves for some sibling bonding time. We’ve been doing this since the year after our dad died (preceded by our mom’s death three years before that) and we figured out this was the 11^th such activity. We typically travel somewhere to get a break from our everyday lives and to enjoy activities of the locale. The granddaddy of these was two years ago when we went to Amsterdam. But even when we do not venture far from home, these are always special times.

This year was one of those “stay close to home” times as we celebrated our SIBSAB during the Bentonville Film Festival in Northwest Arkansas, close to where my two sisters live.

Driving over from Memphis in my still new car, I got to Bentonville in the afternoon just in time to meet my siblings at the house we had rented just a few short blocks from the downtown square where all the festival activities would take place. After getting settled into our house, we walked back to the square and took in one of our favorite activities, for our sisters having a great cup of Joe and for my brother and I, a great beer.

Then we wandered through the BFF tents and booths set up by the sponsors and vendors, getting lots of freebies and enjoying the splendid weather at this third annual event, cofounded by Academy Award-winning actress Geena Davis.

The first day of our SIBSAB also coincided with it being the Bentonville First Friday, which is a monthly outdoor block party on the square with live music. This afforded my sister a chance to dance to the music with her grandson when we ran into him and his mom at the square.

The next morning, we had tickets to one of the featured films Mully. What an incredible story! Without giving out too much details to spoil it for you, it is a true rags to riches story but with a twist as it documents how one man forsook those riches and saved the lives of many orphan children in Kenya, as told in his own words and with some of his own home movies. It was an unbelievably moving story that left most of the audience in tears, myself included, that only got that much more emotional when Charles Mully himself…

…strolled up the aisle after the film for a Q&A session with the director and producers.

A story of the film along with its BFF award, and a snapshot of Mully made the front page of the local newspaper in a photograph in which my brother also happened to be captured.

It is scheduled for release in October so watch for it. You will not want to miss it. As we left, still wiping a few tears from our eyes, Geena Davis strolled by cordially speaking to everyone, as this was the film she chose to attend that morning.

We followed up the film with a delicious lunch and beer at the restaurant at Crystal Bridges before wandering through some of the exhibits.

In the early afternoon, we had guided tour tickets to the Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian house that has been relocated from New Jersey to the Crystal Bridges property.

On my visit to see my sisters last fall, I was able to go through on a brief self-guided tour but this hour long guided tour was outstanding. With one of the most knowledgeable tour guides, we gained an immense background insight into this home, its construction/move to Arkansas, and its owner’s history. If you are ever in the area, this house and Crystal Bridges as a whole is a must see.

That evening, just before sunset after a fabulous dinner at Press Room, we wandered back over to Crystal Bridges to experience James Turrell’s The Way of Color. This Skyspace is one of several he has created throughout the world where observers experience color as well as your own unique perception of color as dusk turns into night.

As the sun sets, photography cannot capture the color of the sky we see through the open aperture, as it only exists in our minds. With the walls tinted pink from hidden LED lighting, the sky turns a beautiful emerald green color before transforming into yellows and blues as the wall color changes.

It was an incredible experience, captured only as an image in our minds as these photographs documented just the projected colors and not the cerebral ones.

As a nightcap, we made our way over to the front entrance of Crystal Bridges to view Leo Villareal’s LED lighted sculpture Buckyball. Around the base, the museum has provided comfortable wooden chaises upon which to recline and watch the multi-colored light show.   I don’t know how long we stayed as the color pattern never repeated it self but it was a wonderful conclusion to an absolutely fabulous day.

Our last day together started with my sister’s grandson’s third birthday party…

…a great time made even more fun as the birthday boy captured our images with his own camera from his shorter perspective.

That afternoon, we went through some old photo albums of our mom’s divvying the photos up among us.

It was a trip down memory lane with some photos reaching back 50 years, saddened only by the images of our mom in the late 1980s as her health deteriorated just months before her death.

The saddest part of our annual SIBSAB is always the saying goodbye, which we had to do at the end of the evening since we were not all staying at the same house before traveling home Monday morning. But our experience was uniform as we all upon parting expressed that we each thought it was one of the best SIBSABs we had had. And our time together was enhanced further by a greater sense of closeness to each other even though we live many miles away. And has also become tradition; we selected our next SIBSAB venue even before this one ended so we would all have a full year to look forward to our next Sibling Sabbatical.

See you next year!