Mr. MacGregor

I seem to have caught that cold that’s been going around Central Ontario and eastern Australia. I tried writing something earlier, but it came out about as unpeppy as me. So here’s a tale of my childhood, written last summer. I hope you enjoy it.

Mummy plumped me onto a kitchen chair, pulled my pink and white canvas shoes onto my feet, licked her fingers and settled my hair. She had changed her blouse.

“Where are we going, Mummy?”

“We’re going to visit Mr. MacGregor.”

The baby buggy was on the front walk. Mummy glanced in to make sure Dougie was still asleep. She called to Mac to watch the others, we’d only be gone a few minutes. Mac was busy showing Ian something in the bean patch, and waved us away with “Yeah, yeah, see ya.” Keith looked up from his metal scoop shovel, stared at Mummy for a moment, and resumed his work.

Mummy took my hand. Down we went through the backyard and out onto the dirt road, past the mailbox. We turned away from the Greysons next door, and past the Shirriff’s house across the road, into unknown territory. I didn’t know Mr. MacGregor.

“Mummy, does Mr. MacGregor have any children?”

“No, dear. Mr. MacGregor lives all alone.”

Living alone must be a terrible thing, because Mummy replied in the same tender, sad tone she had used the other day when she told Keith, “I’m afraid she’s dead, honey.” Dot had wandered out to the highway, past the fence which we were never to cross, and got hit by a transport truck. Keith had been standing beside the woodstove, cupping her limp, grey body in his hands, squeezing his lips tight together while Mummy made her pronouncement. Dot was Keith’s kitten, he had named her. Then suddenly she wasn’t anybody’s kitten.

Besides, nobody lives alone. I lived with Mummy and Daddy and Malcolm Keith Ian Dougie and Blackie and Dot - no - Dot was dead. But there were toads and garter snakes and spittlebugs and robins and juncos. The Wilsons had horses and cats. Mrs. Greyson wore a white dress with black polkadots, Mr. Greyson had no teeth, and their yellow dog Cindy hid under their bed during thunderstorms. Johnny Shirriff lived with his mummy, who was the fattest woman in the world, and his grandpa, who scared me with his cigar and old housecoat and cane and shuffly brown slippers. Everybody lived with somebody.

“Mummy, is Mr. MacGregor a bad man?”

“Why no, dear! Whatever made you think that? He’s a very nice man; you’ll see.”

At the end of a gravel drive in a weedy yard was a two-storey red brick house. Mr. MacGregor let us into the front room, and settled himself into his armchair. He certainly didn’t look like a bad man. He had teeth and regular clothes and shoes and glasses, just like Daddy. Unlike Daddy, Mr. MacGregor had a round, wrinkled face and very little hair and rosy cheeks. He was about sixty or a hundred years old.

Mummy told Mr. MacGregor about the casserole she’d brought him, and they talked about this and that for a few minutes. Then she smiled at me and nudged me forward. When I arrived at Mr. MacGregor’s chair, he set me on his knee and continued to chat with Mummy. I was content to sit on his knee and be a visitor since I knew that it’s a terrible thing to live alone. On the little table beside the armchair was a framed photo of a pleasant plump woman; I wondered who it was.

I was startled when Mr. MacGregor looked down into my face and smiled. “Are you my little girl?” he asked. The poor old man! No wonder Mummy was sorry for him: he didn’t even know that he lived alone! I looked at the floor, silent. But Mr. MacGregor continued his questions. “Would you like to live with me? Are you my little girl?” I briefly considered. I wouldn’t miss my brothers, but Daddy would miss me. There was nothing else for it: no matter how much it hurt Mr. MacGregor’s feelings, I had to tell him the truth.

Imitating my mother’s sympathetic tone of voice as best I could, I answered Mr. MacGregor. “No, I’m Daddy’s little girl.” I was puzzled but relieved when my statement was met not with tears but with hearty laughter from both Mr. MacGregor and Mummy.

Mummy and I walked home soon afterward, and I roamed the backyard, looking for spittlebugs.

Three Rhymes and a Movie

I. The Rhymes

As promised, here are the first three of the limericks made from the words provided by the entrants of last week’s blog contest.

Eyegillian offered the word “explore”. Her limerick will gain sidebar status on May 7th.

(thanks to Gelett Burgess)

• I wish that my room had a door!
• I don’t care so much for a floor,
• But without any way
• To get out and go play,
• I won’t have a chance to explore!

 

Alyson offered the word “Pluto”. Your limerick will be front-paged on May 14.

• Is Pluto a planet or not?
• I used to know, but I forgot.
• To force its demotion
• Has caused me emotion;
• My horoscope now has a blot!

 

Jack’s mum offered “flash”, but I haven’t quite managed that one yet, so today I’ll post her other suggestion, “Transylvania”. It’ll be sidebarred… umm… Checkers, what’s three times seven?

•  A passenger from Transylvania
• Smiled and laughed till his stop: Pennsylvania.
• He was trying his best
• To ward off arrest:
• “For concealed weapons found, they’ll arraign ya.”

 

II. The Movie

 While I couldn’t find a Youtube video of Burton Cummings singing “I Will Play a Rhapsody”, Themarvelousinnature sent a link to some Canadians named Keith, Ken, and Frank jamming in Keith’s basement. Apart from the opening ritardando, they’re really not bad. So here’s a link to a coupla guys on accoustic guitars and their singing cohort (the twin brother of the one guitarist!), belting out their tribute to Burton Cummings. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vqreP9Mc9Y

Paris Pennies

A little nest for a little nest egg.

Sometime last fall, E.g. and I started planning a ten-day trip to Paris, which quickly expanded to include my mother and Jack’s mum and Jack. After much sifting of web sites, we chose a three-bedroom apartment in the 2nd arrondissement where we could all stay and share the rent. Short-term rental is less expensive than staying at a hotel, and less grotty than staying at a hostel.

Still, it’s a good chunk of cash. It’s an even bigger chunk temporarily, because the damage deposit equals the rental price. So we’ve been trying to be a little more careful with our money.

It’s interesting to me to notice how little care is generally taken with that lowliest piece of money, the penny. It’s hard to go for a walk without seeing one, or even several, abandoned on a sidewalk, on a manhole cover, or in the gutter. It may be jagged from being run over countless times, or half-sunk in asphalt tar. They’re everywhere! So I decided to collect them.

I told E.g. and Jack about my project. I took a sturdy plastic container that used to hold laundry detergent, and put some dollar-store bags of coin rollers in it. Jack found a little cardboard box at home, cut a slot in it, and labeled it PARIS PENNIES in thick magic marker. Gillian started filling a little metal coin bank with change from her wallet.

Sometimes I found nickels, and oftener dimes — maybe because they look more like pennies. I found some British leftovers from a standby weekend in London, put it in an envelope, and set that in the plastic container. Since some of that “change” was a ten-pound note, I was inspired to add a few of my own notes — a bit of babysitting money, a little catsitting money, some of my petstore wages.

Yesterday, E.g. was making little worried sounds regarding Paris and other expenses looming on the horizon. I decided to count what had been stashed away. I totted everything up, and had Jack carry the plastic container to E.g. “I need Jack’s help,” I told E.g., “to carry 500 pounds.”

Five hundred and forty-eight, to be more exact. At least in British currency. We had collected $1,104 (1090 American, 1162 Australian, 1389 New Zealand). The stash included 32 rolls of coins, of which 14 were pennies. That’s 700 of those neglected little copper pieces. An old adage comes to mind.

Around the Bend

 E.g. has her new blog title. When the Big Bad Science Museum huffed and puffed away her right to her title, numerous virtual hugs and sympathetic harrumphs were sent her from both her regulars and mine. Their comments cheered her considerably, and she finally sat down after supper yesterday to follow Goodbear’s advice, which was to think of her favourite journey and find a symbol in it.

E.g. decided that to her, the journey itself is at least as important as the destination. So she reviewed her photos of roads and hiking trails and boardwalks, and Jack and I refused to take Cai out until some name clicked. “The Crooked Mile?” Not metric enough. “The Long and Winding Road”? Trite. “Road to Rivendell”? Doesn’t express the techno side too well. “Footprints in the Air”? Not piscean enough. “Fred”? Some other day, maybe. “Fiddling Out of a Barn?” That’s enough beer for one night.

Finally, E.g. had a new blog title, like an unfamiliar wine. She sniffed it cautiously, sipped it, closed her eyes, rolled it around on her tongue, let it seep in, and pronounced it good. Jack accompanied her as she chose and cropped a different photo for her title bar, and then she wrote a lovely Thank-you/Introductory entry while Jack and Cai and I busied ourselves with bedtime business. You’re all invited to the housewarming — just click on the unwound road on my sidebar.

Gillian’s small heartsearching task last night has me wondering. What’s my own attitude regarding the importance of a destination versus the importance of the journey? This question probably needs more reflection, but so far I think I most agree with her in the literal sense of walking and hiking. I like to look around, admiring the leaves, smiling at the toadstools, waving to the chipmunks. I tend to walk quickly, but I’d rather walk than cycle or drive, rather snowshoe than snowmobile, rather cross-country ski than downhill.

In the more figurative sense, however, I do like to know where I’m going. I’ve been chief planner for our past several vacations. What is there to see? Where are the hostels? How many hours would we have to drive on this day? On which days is that museum closed? All those details, from the broadest to the pickiest — I love planning them. Am I showing a greater interest in process or objective, in journey or destination?

E.g. and I have been discussing several possible changes to our family situation lately. It’s occasionally been hard going, with the hardest unknown for me being not the “how” or even the “when”, but the “if”. At last, though, all the ifs have been answered, and I can relax a little. I’ll settle down now and enjoy the hike with E.g., watching for the next blaze, happily discovering what’s just around the next bend.

Copywrong

I arrived home from work last night to find E.g. hunched at her computer, causing hundreds of tiny stick figures to become tiny stick corpses, each lying in its own shiny little mosquito-drop of blood. E.g. is the one who writes the “exploratorium” found on my blogroll, or at least she has been until now.

She told me she had received a note from Exploratorium, the Exploratorium, a science museum, asking that she cease and desist from using their name for her blog.

I could see the museum’s concern. There’s E.g.’s blog, practically at the top of the list, the seventh item on Google page four. Anyone might be misdirected. And heaven forfend that she increase in popularity enough to move up to item 46! The museum might as well close its doors now.

Okay, I’m ranting. The museum is completely in the right: E.g. is infringing their copyright. I’m snippy, though, because E.g. had been very pleased about “inventing” her blog’s name, and last night she was feeling all crumpled inside like someone had insulted her baby or torn a limb off her apple tree. It made me want to rise to my full height, reach up and punch that old museum in the toe.

But they’re in the right. There’s nothing for it, then, but to look for a new name. I suggested a few:

• Muirotarolpxe;
• Explorservation;
• Gillian’s Eye.

E.g. will come up with one on her own, of course, and all will once again be right with the world. But the situation got me thinking: What if the Estate of King Solomon contacted me, and told me I was commiting plagiarism? What if Home Depot claimed prior patent to the designation of their Right Blue armchair, and told Bonnie to change her blog’s title? What if Checkers Restaurant in Ottawa decreed that Checkers’ owner would have to name him something else?

Since I would hate for any of my blogfriends to be caught unawares, I decided that this morning I would, as a service to you all, prepare a list of alternative titles. And just to be on the safe side, for those blogs with tag lines, I’ve included modifications of them as well. Here goes:

Kibble Cup Owner’s World — spreading the buttoned wool sweater dog vibe worldwide.

Cooooodyyyy Beeeeeeeeaaar’s Friiiieeeeeeends!

A Singular Instance of Quotidian Ephemera

The Aged Catsup — because fridge cleaning isn’t for sissies.

Thegreatlyappreciatedindiverseenvironmentalecosystemsand -theirinhabitantsbothvertebrateandinvertebrate — visit Aristotle.com for applicable aphorisms.

The Correct Shade of Cyan — Recounting a lifetime of participation in underwater dives. No whelks were harmed in the making of this blog.

Some Reflections Concerning Life in the City — about seeking and perhaps finding a salvageable or inherent integrity or beauty or other positive value in omnes res.

Gareth Tedi blog – Canines of Celtic origin.

Voice of either the Testudine or Streptopelia turtur, depending on Your Preferred Interpretation of the Ambiguously-termed Lifeform

Hmm. Some of the above proposals may need some tweaking.

Two Spirits

Glory be to God for dappled things!  — Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”.

In my short career as bloggist, whenever I’ve received a comment, I’ve gone to check out the commenter’s blog. This past week I had two blogs to investigate. Both were written by men, and both have a certain bluntness to them, but the similarities pretty much end there. It was a sheep-and-goat experience for me, to retain one blogger’s comment (and therefore his link) and to delete the other.

The zapped blogger sent me to a page which made me think he hadn’t seen enough of my writing to notice that I’m an Irish-descended queer from the colonies. Breathtakingly offensive. But enough of him.

The other blogger…man, this guy works hard! Urban Observation’s  stuff is gritty and honest and courageously personal. From the few pages I dipped into, I learned that he’s an American of African descent who grew up in the Bronx ghetto. He studied well enough to land a decent office job when he grew up. For his pains, he’s been labelled an “Oreo”, a traitor to his race. And yet — if I got this right — he’s come home to his neighbourhood, the ghetto from which he had always been encouraged to escape.

Let’s see, get out the books on myths and archetypes, flip-flip-flip, protagonist leaves ordinary world, goes to other world, returns with increased wisdom to own world, that makes him… a hero.

An earlier entry of mine, in which I explained how my pets got their names, was called “Adam’s First Task”. Long before Adam became a dirt farmer and sweaty baker, his first job was to name all the animals. Naming is fundamental to human language, which in turn is fundamental to human interaction. A string of letters becomes a word only by consensus, which means that at least two people must agree on its meaning. Unfortunately — ironically? — to define a word is also to limit it.

Apparently, to some of Urban Observation’s acquaintances, the meaning of “black” doesn’t include “decently-paid office worker”. A South-east Asian classmate of mine referred to her husband as a “banana”, which is the Asian equivalent of an Oreo. Most, if not all, lesbigay Christians have had the experience of other people believing that “queer Christian” is an oxymoron. And on it goes, with language, the tool that should increase the human capacity for love and acceptance, being used instead as a weapon to tamp us into restrictive little boxes and jab us with narrow pointy sticks.

Once upon a time, certain tribes preferred two-spirited people — those who had an innate understanding of both masculine and feminine ways of being — to be their shamans. They were the holy men and women, the unusual ones, the ones who had visited two worlds.

I need to rush off to work now, but I will leave the final word to a Cardigan Welsh Corgi whose wisdom I missed the first time around: Checkers suggested, during the “Name-and-genderize-the-sea-turtle-stuffy” contest, that the turtle’s gender should be green.

(Wordless Wednesday) The Unbearable Lightness of Cheesies

Cute and Conscientious

I have a World Wildlife Fund “Passport” — the organization sends me e-petitions to sign or e-letters to slightly modify and send to governments, thanking them for saving bits of rainforest or reminding them to keep their pledges regarding Stellar Dolphins, or what-have-you.

The WWF is an organization I trust and respect. It also sells cute little heftily-priced stuffed animals that come with an “adoption” certificate and a guarantee that part of the proceeds goes to support the species you buy.

This week my WWF branch, the Canadian one, sent me an e-bulletin with the novel idea of adopting a sea turtle and hiding it along with the sweets for the Easter egg hunt. Now that I’m into a blog called “The Voice of the Turtle”, I thought I’d like onea them turtles myself. I am NOT into collecting anything, but the occasional totem is fine, especially when there’s a Good Cause attached to it.

Then I had a peek on the American WWF site, to see if they sell sea turtles too. Wow! You guys have DOZENS of stuffed cuties, everything from three-toed sloths to red-footed boobies! I am mightily impressed.

Paper Towels Ad Nauseam

A good 25 per cent or so of my reading public — i.e. Cody Bear’s mum – has asked me to write a little more about megaesophagus. Cody Bear suffers from gastroparesis, which shares similarities in definition and symptoms to megaesophagus. Today I’ll just post a quick compare-and-contrast of the two diseases. Tomorrow I’ll go for the human-interest stuff, on how poggles and I have lived with his condition. Someone out there in Blogland has been looking for information on whether megaesophagus can be outgrown. I’ll address our personal experience regarding that question tomorrow.

Caveat: the information here is strictly googlesearch; I’m no expert. I had never heard of megaesophagus before our vet diagnosed it, and never heard of gastroparesis until reading Cody Bear’s mum’s comment yesterday.

But anyway:

Similarities

Both gastroparesis and megaesophagus are a failure of peristalsis (smooth muscle contraction), resulting in food not moving properly through the digestive system.

Both gastroparesis and megaesophagus may be idiopathic (i.e. the cause is unknown), or they may be the result of an underlying disease.

Both g.p. and m.e. mean a lot of barf cleanup.

Both g.p. and m.e. can be diagnosed by barium x-ray.

Management for both g.p. and m.e. may include frequent small meals,  pureed or liquid diet, and in extreme cases, a feeding tube.

Differences

Gastroparesis is the lack of contractions of the stomach muscles, resulting in food remaining in the stomach too long. Megaesophagus is the lack of contractions of the esophagus, resulting in food remaining in the gullet. The esophagus stretches, and the food sits in it as though in a pouch.

Gastroparesis may be helped somewhat by medication. This is no picnic, since the meds produce side effects such as anxiety, depression, and (sigh!) vomiting. Megaesophagus cannot be helped by medication. Meds are available for the underlying disease that causes it, but there is nothing in the case of idiopathic canine megaesophagus.

Paper towels needed for g.p. are used to clean up vomit, meaning stomach contents. Paper towels needed for m.e. are used to clean up regurgitations, meaning food and water that never made it to the stomach in the first place.

The feeding tube in extreme cases will bypass the stomach of a g.p. patient. A patient with m.e. has a functional stomach, so a feeding tube would connect to it.

Okay, time for some ball playing before Mummy goes for more petstore training. Stay tuned for the human-interest segment tomorrow!