A more mystical concept of animals

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston, The Outermost House

This quotation was on a poster at our vet’s office in Atlanta, and it stuck with me so that I eventually read Beston’s book, which is a wonderful piece of nature writing that documents a year he spent in a tiny cottage at the very tip of Cape Cod.

It’s much on mind today because I am going to the vet later on today, but will leave that place alone. It sucks  – hard – that we outlive our animals, but that’s the deal we strike when we bring them into our homes and lives.

We say to God, “I will take your creature to our home, provide for it and together we will grow and learn about each other. We will make each other happy and fill voids and we will all be better for it.”

And God replies,  “So it shall be, but only for a little time of years.”

We sayd “Deal!” and dive in. Then our time is up, and we’re sad, but it must be, for the final boon the steward grants to those in his care is relief from pain, darkness and confusion.

And then, what? I really don’t know. Animal heaven. Warm grass, cool shade, and endless hamburger.

Another comes to take that place, and we begin again.

The beginning and end and midpoint of times

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

- Hippolyta, I.ii.8-12

Yesterday I finished Infinite Jest, but I think it’ll be awhile before I can form a full opinion of it. Parts of it are brilliantly funny, but it’s a long, long book and even the footnotes have footnotes.  There is no real ‘end’ to speak of, and several things are left unresolved. Wallace’s writing style is infectious. Last night I was drifting in and out of twilight sleep while trying to make sense of the book, and found that I was doing it in his long sentences and characteristic expressions (cf, “the howling fantods”).

I’ll probably be revisiting the book every so often, since it very definitely seems like the sort of book in which you discover (or re-remember) new things at each go-round.

Work is slowing somewhat as we reach the end of this quarter. The technical stuff is pretty much done and the various teams are in closing mode. My job, at this point, is to answer any remaining little questions but mostly to stay out of the way and let the account managers manage accounts. July begins the next quarter for us. The circle of life continues.

We had a very good Father’s Day around here – strawberries and homemade pastry (!) for breakfast, Mass, a long day on the couch reading (see above), burgers on the grill and pie for dessert. We played with the cat, watched fireflies and tried to stay cool.

Our oldest girl is traveling with her grandparents out west to Colorado and Iowa. She seems to be having a good time, but is calling home every other day or so. Make of that what you will. Her brother will be going with the other grandparents out to the Arkansas/Oklahoma/Missouri quadrant next month and is looking forward to that, since most of that time will be at the lake. The others are flitting to and from friends houses and generally having a pretty good time of it all. One of them opines aloud that since we have a dog, a cat, two rats and a handful of fish, the time is ripe for a chinchilla; these wonderings generally go unremarked-upon.

Smallest girl and the cat chase each other around. The baby is starting to eat a bit of cereal, and the dog abides.

The garden is doing quite well. The tomatoes that I thought were dying have actually come back quite strong. I pull them off as they start to blush and we stick ‘em in the kitchen window to finish off. The real success story, in terms of pure vitality, are the zucchini plants which have complete taken over their part of the patch and are on the verge of swallowing up the two squash plants. Whatever it is that cucurbits need as regards soil, sun and moisture, we seem to have it.

Most of the sunflower seedlings got eaten by the rabbits, as you may recall. A few managed to survive and one of them is topping out at about six feet tall. It’s got a nice looking bud forming in the middle, and everyone’s looking forward to see it gyrate slowly as it follows the sun.

Speaking of the sun, I got some celestial geekery in on Father’s Day, since it fell on the summer solstice this year. It was plenty bright and hot, and I made the most of my day off by parking it on the couch to read and recover from the prior day’s bike ride and a little niggling head cold that we’re passing back and forth. Right sunset, something along the horizon formed a very nice crepuscular ray pattern in the sky. Whatever it was cast a long shadow in the sky that went right down to the horizon, which was ultimately obscured by trees and houses.  I’ve never noticed it before, so maybe it only happens on the solstice. This would be nifty as can be, and I’ll be looking for it next year if the weather is clear enough.

The quote at the top is from Act 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I dropped it in here because we’re about 2 days from Midsummer and also because we’re in a new moon as I write this, so it makes good lunar sense. Little by minuscule little, the days are getting shorter. They’re not going out quietly, mind you. It’s well nigh 100 here today. But they are starting to diminish, to decrease a little. In a sort of celestial liturgy, the days begin to decrease with the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, who also had to decrease. The days will shorten, and night will fall, and it will keep falling until the next Feast of Nativity, when the rising sun retakes the sky and the daylight wins again. The shadows beneath the trees, moving in slow arcs across the ground, the analemma, solstices and equinoxes, the

…organization of the universe and the force of its elements, the beginning and the end and the midpoint of times, the changes in the sun’s course and the variations of the seasons. Cycles of years, positions of the stars, natures of animals, tempers of beasts, powers of the winds and thoughts of men, uses of plants and virtues of roots – such things as are hidden I learned and such as are plain; for Wisdom, the artificer of all, taught me.

These things all play out, for me, in the ever-changing shapes of light and shadow on the ground, the thick green smell of the countryside in its peak and the slow wheeling of the sun, moon and stars. They’re a slow celestial liturgy – majestic and quiet, and but sometimes also silly. Chesterton noted in Orthodoxy that joyous repetition is the delight of a child’s game. The thing repeated (“Do it again!”) is done for the sheer happiness of it, whether it’s making a funny horse noise to amuse a three-year-old or creating thousands of little daisies on a roadside. He may have made the mountains and set limits for the ends of the sea, but He also seems to be quite fond of thistles and goldfinches, at least around here.

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

So there’s this cat…

On Friday, I rode my bike for 16 miles, cleaned up, ate breakfast and then headed out for an early morning appointment with a partner of ours and (hopefully) a new customer. It’s a good 40+ miles into town from here, but most of that is interstate and I can make pretty good time. The night before, the weather had been pretty heinous (heavy thunderstorms, tornado watches, &c), but the morning had broken pretty nicely. I pulled into the parking lot, idled for a bit with the AC running while I checked e-mail and my teeth one last time, then got out of car. I hit the button to lock the doors, which also turns on the alarm.

Chirp-chirp! and then: meow

Wait, what?

I hit the button again: chirp-chirp, and then: meow meow meow meow as regular as can be. My first thought was that the alarm was flipping out. A woman passing by and I looked at each other while the car continued to meow. Oh Lord, I thought, I’ve run over a cat. I looked under the car. No cat. I walked around the car. No cat. The meowing was…in the car. I popped the hood, and the meowing got louder.

There was a cat somewhere in the engine compartment of the car.

I couldn’t see it, but the woman and I could both hear it.

Well, says I, the engine will certainly cool down in a little while and I’m sure Felix, or whatever his/her name is will slink out directly. No doubt the cat wants to calm its nerves after an 80 mph ride up I-24 before slinking away. I certainly would. I lower the hood, assure the passers-by that I will not restart the engine unless I can confirm that the cat is gone. And, of course, I won’t, since I don’t to risk turning the cat into mincemeat should it happen to contact the serpentine belt or radiator fan or whatever moving component is nearby. I closed the hood and went to my meeting.

About an hour later, I come back out and chirp the alarm a few times. Nothing. The cat seems to be gone. One last time: chirp-chirp, and then: meow. The cat is not gone, and the meows are sounding a little…faint. I join  another meeting via conference call and everyone on the line has a good laugh about my predicament:

1. I seem to have a cat, which I cannot see.
2. If I can’t see it, I can’t get it out.
3. If I can’t get it out, I can’t leave, QED.

The woman comes back and the two of us poke around the engine compartment to see if we can get a look. I call some cat-owning friends for advice. I tweet my predicament, which also updates my Facebook page. Internet advice starts rolling in, of varying degrees of helpfulness.

Drop some food, but I don’t have any. Obtain a small dog. Get on the highway and really open it up. Wait it out.

It’s starting to get sort of hot out in the parking lot. I’m starting to form a plan involving a tow-truck, the closest Toyota dealership and lots of wrenches. In a last ditch effort, I start removing the plastic covers that hide the undercarriage beneath the front bumper. Neither hide nor hair of the cat is visible. Suddenly, a paw drops down right in front of my face. Right! I wedge my hand in the crack and start fishing around. After a minute or two, a tiny grey kitten emerges.

I hold it up, and the office people who have been watching me from an open doorway let out a cheer. They donate a box, and some water but – oddly enough – not a home. I haul the cat to our house. Plans form and reform. There’s no way, says I, that this cat could have traveled before secreting itself away in my bumper. Someone is no doubt combing this neighborhood looking for it. We should hang up signs announcing that we have FOUND: A GREY KITTEN and include our phone number.

Which we do, but really, the effort is half-hearted at best because the children have already seen the kitten and the result is a foregone conclusion, to wit, we own a cat. Today the signs came down and I bought some extra strength litter in which she can crap.

We named her Athena, because she is also grey-eyed and also because she too seems to have jumped fully formed from the brow of Zeus and into my car. No one has seen any cats around lately – strays or otherwise. It’s a mystery. So, anyway, we have a cat now.

Update: according to The Google, this whole cat-in-the-engine-compartment is not at all uncommon. Go figure.

Gardening update. Moby Dick. A tiny update on the children. New bike.

Welp. Our tomato crop is blighted or something. Maybe they got too much rain, or the aphids did more damage than I thought. In any event, half of them are now composting. The others look like they’re hanging on for now, but we put together 3 new tomato plants in deck containers as a hedge (ha, ha) against a total in-the-ground loss. Of the two peppers, one looks pretty good. The other looks a little anemic. The yellow squash is already blooming and setting little 2″ baby squashes. The zukes have seriously bushed out, but no blooms as yet.

To our herb plantation, I added lavender and mint. The mint is in a container, that it might not take over the yard, which it will if given half a chance. The kids got used to having a patch of it near the deck of our old house, and I’d been looking for it off-and-on for a few weeks. Lowes finally had some, so I brought it home. We’re drying a few of these in the kitchen to see how that goes: thyme, rosemary and oregano. They smell pretty good at any rate.

The compost heap seems to be slowing down a litte, which is good. I think the brown and green ratio is getting a little more manageable. The whole thing has certainly shrunk down considerably, which is a good sign. It doesn’t reek (as much) either, which is another good sign.

Over last weekend, we stopped by a local nursery and went all moon-eyed over some of their stock. Rather than just plant stuff pell-mell thoughout the yard, we’ve asked one of their guys to come over and give us a little help with some planning. There are things that we’d love to have (gardenias, for one), and I’ve read some mixed reviews on them for our zone. Ditto for azaleas. Pachysandra, my favorite evergreen groundcover needs more shade than I think we can offer it,  E. wants a garden entirely of the color blue, and so on, and so on, in my best Yul Brynner voice: et CETera, et CETera, et CETera.

What I hope to get out of this little visit is: plant this, not that. That will die here. The fee is pretty modest, and it’s easily worth it so that we don’t torment any more hibiscus bushes.

I’ve put Moby Dick aside for a bit to re-read King Lear. Someone on a message board I frequent dropped a reference to Lear the other day and I was reminded of how much I’d forgotten about it.

The constant asides from Melville on the minutiae of the whaling industry were interesting at first, but OK, yeah, I get it, please get back to the action already. I really don’t want another detailed exploration of The Natural History Of  Cetaceans From Pliny To The Present Day.

Am I missing some sort of point? Probably. I’m about halfway through and loathe to shelf it after this long.We wound up our scouting year, our oldest girl swept her gymnastics meet, two of the children are still off on adventure and the the babies abide. Work continues apace.

I’m being fitted for a new road bike – a Specialized Allez -  tomorrow after work and can hardly wait. I took it on a test spin over the weekend and was gobstruck by it’s relative lightness compared to the hybrid. The change in posture will take some getting used to, as will the shifters. But tomorrow can’t come soon enough!

Happy Mother’s Day

Assorted gardening related photos (updated with labels, which I couldn’t seem to do with the iPhone WordPress app).

Herb patch – parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme (!), oregano and basil:

Our Lady’s butterfly garden:

Vegetables-in-the-making. Back to front: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and yello squash. Way way in the back are what’s left of the sunflowers, which isn’t much.

Compost. Mostly green, so a bit on the stinky side right now.

Intra in cubiculum tuum

The house is full of company this weekend. Big doin’s afoot. Thus:

All the grandparents are in town. Pancho is making his First Communion today at 2. Tomorrow is also his 8th birthday and it’s Mother’s Day. Two of our smaller girls are leaving us on Sunday, as one set of grandparents is taking them on a long-promised Disney cruise next week.

I spent most of Thursday fooling around with python and our product’s API. Any opportunity to reacquaint myself with python is A Good Thing, and I really should spend a little bit of time every week poking around with it.

The weather here has been – if I may risk my erudition here – craptacular. Huzzah for the rain and all that, but really, we’ve had enough now. All the creeks and rivers are well over their banks, the ground is so wet that there are large standing puddles everywhere and part of our garden area looks like a paddy. To say nothing of the mosquitoes.

I don’t want to turn this into a current events sort of blog, because my posting schedule is just too random. Even so, my thoughts on the local National Day of Prayer kerfuffle. Namely, the fuss raised around here over the mayor and governor’s attendance.

On the one hand, as E. quite correctly pointed out to me, this is a private event which is privately funded. If elected officials wish to attend in support of their constituents or as private citizens, no one has any right to prevent it. But the more I mulled this over, the more I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the whole thing just didn’t sit right. The more I pruned and weeded (my favorite mulling activities), the closer I got, and then it hit me:

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.

But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you (Mt 6:5-6)

The line between public witness and a public display of religiosity for its own sake may be fine indeed, and it’s probably just as well – none of us were promised an easy road. But what do I know? I’ve my own issues of pride to deal with. Was it prideful to say that?

Probably.

Rats. See what I mean?

On locales

The April showers came all at once and spent the better part of today soaking our area. Which is good, since we’re still feeling the effects of last year’s drought in some places. Certainly the area farmers ought to be happy – the hayfields ought to be in good shape, which means better winter feeding for livestock, and so on.

We have some good friends locally who raise some of their own beef. Late last year, we bought part of a side and it was delicious. We’re down to the last dozen or so oddball cuts and haven’t had a stinker yet (well, except for the ribs – they were a bit on the fatty side). They’ve upped the ante and gone to three head this year. Last week, the kids got to go over and feed them. From big bottles. We didn’t belabor the fact that we will probably be eating one of them at some point. The cows, I mean. Our friends always name their food animals after food (“Big Mac”, “Whopper”, “Chocolate”, “Steak” and so on). Seeing their place outside of town renewed the itch I’ve had to buy a real piece of property somewhere Out There where there are no covenants or city ordinances to prevent, say, a beehive or a chicken or two.

On the other hand, at the 2 year mark in this house, I think we’ve finally just unpacked the last box recently. Certainly I’m in no hurry to try to stage and sell a place that\’s still full of small kids. Ugh. We got lucky when we moved up here from Atlanta – put our place on the market and had an offer in the first week. Not sure we could pull that off again. Maybe in a few years. Our neighborhood is great, and we’ve finally reached a point where the insides and outsides are Our Own Place: paint, some landscaping changes, vegetables, compost bin. All the little things. We’ll see. Meanwhile, we scan the real estate classifieds and daydream about some of these 10 and 15 acre lots that are out there. Mmmm. I, for one, miss being surrounded by mature wooded areas. Most of the area around here is reclaimed pasture, so you can imagine that it’s a bit on the bare side. There are whole populations of birds and critters that go along with the trees, and I find myself missing them.Most of them. Not the roof rats. I don’t miss those little bastards at all.

Now everyone’s in bed and we have some movies to watch. Disc 1 of Season 4 of BSG and Munich. Have to pace ourselves, you know. Tomorrow, if there’s a break in the rain, I’ll unwrap the statue of the Blessed Virgin that we brought with us and install it near the butterfly garden. May is the Marian month, you know.

A note to the children: I found another one on the upstairs door frame. Hear me well: one of these days, I\’m going to catch whoever is doing this. When I do, that person is going to have two problems: a bloody nose and a broken finger.

May

Then came faire May, the fayrest mayd on ground,
Deckt all with dainties of her seasons pryde,
And throwing flowres out of her lap around:
Vpon two brethrens shoulders she did ride,
The twinnes of Leda; which on eyther side
Supported her like to their soueraine Queene.
Lord! how all creatures laught, when her they spide,
And leapt and daunc’t as they had rauisht beene!
And Cupid selfe about her fluttred all in greene.

Well.

It has been quite awhile. Rather than attempt to recap the last nearly-a-year, I’m going to borrow a page from the television script writers and just pick up in media res. Delicious hints will be dropped and just when you think all will be resolved, wham, there’s the season cliff-hanger. If we’re living right, we’ll get picked up again for another run. If not, look for the extras in the DVD release.

Actually, that would be a bit unfair, so here’s a recap: we are now nine hobbits, I’m still working in a semi-sales-and-engineering capacity, we’re still in the middle of Tennessee (had I not mentioned that before?), and were close enough to the tornado to see it drop down out of the cloud and start bearing down on our house. It missed us by about a quarter of mile to the north, but our yard was littered with debris from other people’s houses which were not quite as lucky. All told, 800 homes were affected (or destroyed). The loss of life was two – a mother and her infant. I drive by the place where their house used to be just about every day. All this on Good Friday, no less. I had resolved to stay home and work in the yard, doing menial (but meditative) work like weed-pulling.

But here we are. There are tomatoes, squash, peppers, zucchini and herbs in the ground. Off to one side, the sunflowers are starting to come up. If we can keep the rabbits (and they are Legion) away for awhile, we might have some vegetables. If not, we’ll have some rabbit. Still homeschooling, though not without bumps here and there. Still doing stuff with the Scouts. Still keepin’ on. Pulling weeds. Patchin’ drywall. Et cetera.

by stevecadman

So without further ado, a random thought or two.

I really need to pick up a reference book on Greco-Roman mythology. There are times, when I absolutely need to know the names of the Fates and the computer is just too much of a hassle. Someone will drop a reference in a poem, or I’ll half-remember their names while waking from a dream and it’ll drive me batty for awhile. How nice to be able to haul a book down and look them up. They are, by the way, Clothos, Lachesis and Atropos. One spins the thread of your life, the second measures it, and the third cuts it at your death.  Tidy! They are named in Hesiod’s Theogeny, which is where I had to look them up for the lack of a dictionary. Is it better just to go the sources? Probably. It would be useful to see the Greek myths cross referenced with the Roman versions. Because YOU JUST HAVE TO KNOW THESE THINGS SOMETIMES.

In between appointments today, I perused the wikipedia entries on May Day (since it’s tomorrow), which led me to The Green Man, and then to Jack In The Green, which had me thinking about Frazer again, which made me thankful to be Catholic. The drive home was full of green vistas. I picked up some rat food on the way home (we added a pair of pet rats to our tribe last December) and the second part of Pancho’s birthday gift. I hope he doesn’t…well, you know.

Anyway, happy Roodmas.

Home again, home again.

Just got back into town after a week in Seattle, where I was holed up in a training root for 4 days learning a little more about the products that I’m supposed to be selling. Or assisting in selling – there’s supposed to be a strict separation of Engineering and Sales, though in practice, that wall is little more than a curb. In any case, I thought I knew the stuff pretty well but came away with a whole new bag of tricks and quite a few questions answered. I go back in a few weeks for another session, then a one-day deal in NY some time in September to round things out.

I’m not crazy about the cross-country travel, nor about being away from home for a week at a stretch. The choice in this case was sort of mine – as soon as I got the green light to sign up for training, I max’ed my schedule out just in case someone changed their mind down the road.

In any event, it was nice to re-visit Seattle. I haven’t been in years, though I have some cousins and such that we used to visit there every-so-often when my brothers and I were small. The waterfront area is nicer than I remember, and I was pleased to see that for all of the other development going on, institutions like Ivar’s and Ye Olde Curiosity Shop are still going strong. And, please – daytime temps in the mid-60s? During July? I actually saw some ads on TV with “Beat the heat with our summer savings” and wanted to laugh. Then I was reminded that few homes out there have central AC, so an 80 degree day is sort of a bummer. Oh well. It’s all relative, I guess.

In other news, our smallest boy hurt his arm on the trampoline on the night before I left town. Turns out that he has a small break and will need to have it re-set early Tuesday morning, for which they will need to put him under. The temporary splint and bandage don’t seem to have slowed him down at all, though he’s a bit peeved at missing out on the pool for now. The new cast, we are assured, will be 100% waterproof and safe for use in the pool and tub. Who knew? In any case, little guys heal fast and he should be right as rain in about 3 more weeks. Everyone else is just groovy.

I picked up The Once and Future King for in-flight reading and passing the evenings while away. I read it years ago but only remembered bits and pieces of it as I was in the midst of the Great High School Breakup period. I’m in the last section now and enjoying it, though maybe not as much as Pyle’s versions. Soon as I wrap it up, it’ll be back to Great Expectations.

Back, sort of.

Back from vacation. E and the kids are still in Atlanta visiting folks, which means I’m flying solo here at home for the week. It’s just as well – we’re at the end of our quarter and things are getting a little…testy. We had a great time on the trip: pool time, hanging around, the beach, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Took in a few movies, too: Iron Man, The Hulk and Indy 4. A good time was had by all.

Bookwise, I read Bernard Corwell’s Sharpe’s Tiger (which was really good) and started Desolation Island, which is great so far. My dad loaned me Ken Follet’s World Without End, and I just ordered a copy of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance from Amazon. I was spurred to order it after watching Apocalypse Now Redux last night. Three-hours-plus of Coppola’s Vietnam nightmare. I’m glad I saw it – the original cut has been a favorite of mine for years – but probably will not be revisiting it any time soon. Towards the end, From Ritual to Romance is seen on Kurtz’s desk, alongside Frazer’s The Golden Bough. I’ve read Frazer and occasionally go back to it, just for the literary ya-yas. As to it’s place in anthropology, I’m not qualified to judge. It’s impact on literature in general (and Eliot in particular) makes it worth a visit.

On deck: Das Boot and a few more ultra-quiet evenings before everyone returns to the mother ship.