The Bird Gets the Last Word
You stay down there, and I’ll just sit
Up on my perch, whistle and chirp
And warble ’til you throw a fit
Because I’m being such a twerp—
I’ll flap and flutter, cheep and caw
And drive you right out of your tree
Until you want to break the law
And take a shot or two at me—
But I, no matter how you squirm,
Won’t quit my pestering; so far,
I’m winning, you poor lowly worm,
And soon I’ll also strafe your car.
Awakening
Whose is the voice that speaks my name, Aloud or silently, the same,
In gentle speech or radiant song, Unspoken care, forgiving wrong?
Whose is the loving, laughing voice That makes my waiting heart rejoice,
That wakes my hope and lights the sky With stars, to which my sole reply
Is humble gratitude, delight That such a voice breaks through the night
To search me out, my heart in two, And make it whole?
Your voice. Yes, you.
Whether you’re on board with the celebration of Easter or not, you probably know that around this time of year lots of people think thoughts in a bunny-related vein. Rabbits have long been popular as symbols of fertility, spring and renewal in a wide range of human cultures and groups. If a cute little long-eared, hopping critter should happen to appear at your door in the near future, why not assume it’s a friendly visitation from the harbinger of true spring, whatever the form, and welcome the visit with great hospitality.
In addition to the bunny business, there’s the widespread recognition of the symbolism of eggs to express similar ideas. So whether or not you’re planning to celebrate a visit from the Easter Bunny with Easter Eggs, a rabbit’s presence could very happily be marked by a feast of eggs. Brunch, or otherwise.
I love eggs in so many, many preparations, but I am surely not alone in forgetting, that along with all of those familiar favorites, the egg represents not only a great symbolic entity but also an astoundingly versatile ingredient, capable of being prepared and enjoyed in innumerable ways. Go ahead and celebrate your spring rabbit revels with a great Benedict or soufflé or custard or omelette or eggnog, if you like; I will continue to delight in eating and drinking all of those and many more lifelong loves.
But I might also fiddle around with those tasty little packages of refreshing nourishment in some less expected ways. Like, perhaps, a simple anytime meal of fried eggs on mashed potatoes, with a drizzle of rich gravy (my little trick for making it with meat juices is yummy for this, but I’d leave out the wine when making it for eggs; cream or yogurt would be nicer here; add sausage or leave it plain, as you wish) and a nice scattering of crispy potato crumbs made by pan-frying instant potato flakes in butter. Or enjoy the eggs as an accent in the meal, making Mexican-inspired deviled eggs—my own version of Huevos Diablos, if you will—a very simple item to prepare by mashing the yolks of hard boiled eggs with spicy salsa and crema to taste. Guacamole, by the way, makes the perfect egg-stabilizing perch on the plate, as well as a fitting accompaniment. Mmm, eggs. Hop on over and eat some.
I love James Thurber’s deviously funny little modern fable The Unicorn in the Garden. His way of being so blandly subversive gets me every time. But I also admire the tale, as I always have, primarily because in it, the dreamer wins out over the hard-nosed pragmatist who thinks she can crush his foolishness and browbeat the fantasy out of him. I would far rather be the silly imaginative kid, the one who remains boldly hopeful when all signs point to apocalypse, than live in a grim real world. In fact, if I had my druthers, I might just be not only the frivolous guy seeing the unicorn in the garden but the unicorn itself.
What’s Fact, after all, when faced with the Fantastic?
Would-be debunkers can chase me around all they want, but they’ll find I am galloping ahead of them on the track more steadily than they think!
Not to shed crocodile tears, but don’t you feel sorry for my pain?
In the humid human jungle, there is a rapacious beast that cheerily attacks and devours the happiness of many a poor body.
Menopause. Yessiree, I’m sufficiently past the mid-century mark to be personally acquainted with the joys of middle- and slightly past middle-age. I managed, thanks to magical genes or good luck or some jolly combination of the two, to enter into the mysterious temple of Menopause well ahead of the dull-normal average age of 51. I guess my body just couldn’t wait for the fun. Forty years old? Yay! Sure, I can go right ahead and get on that crazy train.
My doctor thought I might just be a fanciful young’un, imagining I was wandering into menopausal territory at the tender age of forty. Until I described my hot flashes. She already knew about my newly accomplished slide to the bottom of a depressive slope, a thing that (while it is seldom developed in complete isolation from other qualities or characteristics of health issues) can sometimes also be a symptom of menopause. She was not one of those dismissive, demeaning doctors who would’ve opted to imply that I was some kind of hysteric or stupid person. So she did a little checking into my state of being in other ways and lo, what I was experiencing was indeed early onset menopause. Or perimenopause, to be more medically precise.
Anyway, I’m now well past a dozen years of this fun and am still here to tell the tale. What’s particularly interesting to me is that it’s not wildly improbable that I’m, well, okay. I think I might’ve bought, at least a little, into the popular mythology that makes menopause universally into a horror of monstrous proportions. I will never minimize the true suffering that some women experience during menopause, a very real horror. But me, I’ve spent over a decade in the strange land of menopause, and I’m still ticking along.
One thing that I have working in my favor, besides that I have relatively few symptoms and lots of blessed good luck, is that I have great support. I have always existed in the midst of a family, friends and acquaintances where topics of real and everyday importance are generally discussed in real and everyday ways. No big deal. Imperfections, illness, death, human failings, and yeah, menopause. These are all realities and unavoidable. Sometimes painful, sometimes inexpressibly difficult, ugly, terrifying, awful. But in all of that, normal. So why would we be so foolish as to pretend otherwise, to let them loom, magnified, as the sort of thing we can never name, let alone discuss, with others who are statistically likely to have shared the experience and might even have wisdom to share in how to survive?
I’m trying to be smart about protecting myself from the bone density loss that is typical of many women in menopause, taking supplements and keeping active as my doctors have recommended. As an exercise hater, this one isn’t easy for me. I do keep current with monitoring and treating my depression so that I am sad only what seems to me a pretty normal amount and about pretty average things, not depressed in extreme and unhealthy and perniciously persistent ways as I was before I began finding the right health regimen of counseling and medication to keep me on a better path. I use extra skin moisturizer and the occasional application of hair creme rinse because despite having been an almost magically oily youth (and having had to battle high-grade acne as a result) I do find that in my advancing years I now have fairly dry skin and hair.
The big annoyance that remains for me is that my internal thermostat broke when I turned 40. My body forgot how to regulate its own temperature, so now I can go in a matter of seconds from the freezing Undead-body temp I was so long accustomed to experiencing in pre-menopausal years to the miracle of my torso becoming a microwave oven and right back again in a few minutes. Sometimes many times a day. This fun, for thirteen years and counting. And yet I am not a wreck.
The best defense I’ve found thus far is a simple little device that is a hybrid of that grand old invention, the hot water bottle, and the slightly newer iteration of the athlete’s curative bag of ice, a flat water-filled-sponge-containing rectangular envelope thingy that goes by the euphonious rapper-appropriate name of Chillow (trademark registered) and can be laid across my overheated midriff when I can’t seem to get my inner temperature moderated. It’s no cure, but it helps, and help is far better than misery. Even a good old fashioned accordion-folded fan fluttered southern belle-style beats undue discomfort.
I would never be so self-indulgent or ridiculous to call my sufferings massive or anything nearly as important as those of women who endure the real pain possible with menopause and its related conditions. That would be both silly and hypocritical. I’m average, plain and simple and normal, in this experience, even when I’m not exactly on the middle line of the statistical charts. But I can assure you that if you are heading into menopausal territory or someone you know is on her way, there is a path through this particular jungle and you need not be devoured by the beasts met along the way.
See you on the other side of the [very sweaty] swamp.
If the jungle is ruled by a hippo, is it a hippocracy?
I’ve said it time and again: my natural state is static. I love Doing Nothing. I avoid work and difficulty whenever I can.
And I’m not exceedingly sorry about that. It’s clearly not perfect behavior; that’s a truth I will readily confess any old day. But I remain unrepentant. Inaction in and of itself generally has no inherent moral value. Leisure has been good to me.
You people who want to get all up in busyness’s business and do all sorts of things all the time, have at it. Feel free! Me, I mostly feel free when I avoid doing things. Goodnight, now. I’ll get back to you later. Maybe. If you really think it’s urgent, you can come over and slouch alongside me until I wake up again. Happy afternoon!
Rascality
That rapid rabbit Rupert runs and rollicks right apace,
though he requires but rarely rest—despite his rosy face
and rampant racing ’round, his rayed and ruffled wriggling nose,
his rife ripostes, his reeling roll—well, really, you’d suppose
he’d relish full retirement, retreat into some room,
reposing long, but wrong! He longs to ramp up and re-zoom.
I could try to avoid smiling when I’m thinking about this topic, but I’m not sure it’s possible.
And is there any good reason to, anyway?
I can be a silly goose in so many ways; I can duck the inevitable for great lengths of time, and I’m certainly bird-brained enough to think myself above the flighty affectations and affections of lesser beings. But one good thing I learned pretty much when I was still quite a little hatchling is that letting my spirits take wing with every avian in sight is a fine and healthy practice. When I let my thoughts go to the birds, my well-being begins to soar. Who am I to argue with the brilliance of our feathered friends?
Intriguing, isn’t it, how what we admire in one we might fear in another; how sometimes a single characteristic becomes so entwined with our perception of the whole being that we are unable (or at least unwilling) to see the subject except through that distinctive filter.
Take the shark, for example. We anthropomorphize its curved, elegant mouth and its very pointy dental array as a wicked grin because they form so ironically (we think) bloodless a ‘smile’ for an ideally designed killing machine, and subsequently we are content to identify those people whom we find wicked, bloodless, or murderous as Sharks. Never mind that the shark itself is simply being what it is naturally meant to be and doing what it is created to do. Never mind that, often enough, the person we are happy to affiliate with that same stereotyped vision may also be doing what s/he is naturally inclined, expected, and/or paid to do. If the person in question is good at carrying out dispassionate or relentless action, we’re likely to find a convenient metaphor in the shark.
I have long thought, myself, that the mere mention of a character as being dressed in a sharkskin ensemble gave him an air of sangfroid that I suppose must have been similarly associated with the archetype of the coolly relentless shark. I, too, am apparently guilty of stereotyping the creature, and very likely in turn, the person. So it is: we are always looking for shorthand ways to describe and understand those around us.
But I would hope that I can also remain cognizant of those positive and laudable qualities that might also be anthropomorphically applied to a shark, and credit similar ones to my fellow bipedal creatures as well: swiftness, strength, tenacity, fearlessness, and a driving desire to move forward at all times. These are characteristics to which I can only aspire for the most part, never mind being as handsome and sleek as a shark can be in appearance. While I doubt anyone will tend to equate me with the supposedly shark-like attributes of cruel indifference or cold-bloodedness, perhaps I would do well to pursue association with those better ones and see if I can’t be identified with such admirable aspirations after all.
There are lots of jokes and stories that capitalize on the idea that dogs, in their seemingly endless optimism and enthusiastic belief that practically every moment of their existence is the best of its kind. I’ve never lived with a dog as my consistent companion, but I’ve been around other people’s dogs, and seen the people owned by some additional dogs, and it all tends to confirm that quality of canine character. And frankly, that seems to me to be a perfect attitude to emulate, whether you belong to a dog or not.
I may not have the sort of tail that lends itself to wagging with happiness at life’s goodness and I certainly am not the kind to show my appreciation for such things by jumping up to lick anybody on the ear, but I should at the very least state my admiration for what is fine and good and pleasing so that they can know how highly I esteem such gifts. Life, no matter how a dog might enthuse over it, isn’t perfect, and it has its flaws and less than ideal moments. So when the great and admirable happens, I should jolly well share the happiness and let others in on it. Short of barking and running around in circles dizzily, I think that can be appropriately expressed in ways that let other humans in on the secret.
Happiness, whether doggy or human, is best shared, after all. And from what I’ve seen, when dogs and humans can be happy all together, that can be quite the extravaganza of joy indeed. If you feel like it, go ahead and lean back and let out a nice little howl or two of celebration right along with me, and I’ll race you to the sidewalk and back!
Art-Colored Glasses 