The Night Before Solstice

Twas the night before Solstice
When I and the cats
Had just settled down
For a long winter's nap

When out in the hallway
There arose such a clatter
Thunking and clunking
What on earth was the matter?

The cats were not with me
I found none in the house
Has they all scattered thither
In chase of a mouse?

I roared as I strode through
The doorways and halls
"What the hell are you doing?"
"What's going on?"

The last door I yanked open
Revealed a surprise
Leto the kitten
With huge frightened eyes

His head was wedged firmly
Inside a glass jar
I don't even know
How he'd made it that far

In this airless prison
His doom was foretold
I had to act swiftly
I had to be bold

Left hand on the kitten
Right hand on the jar
I grabbed his neck tightly
And twisted the jar

I pulled and I pulled
With all of my might
And I freed my small friend
From his terrible plight

I calmed him and soothed him
And called him by name
"Oh Leto! Poor Leto!"
"You're all right again!"

His purr increased swiftly
And I swear he made clear
"Blessed Solstice to all!"
"I'm so glad I'm still here!"

 Mister Fletcher, Prince Mica and Leto, Christmas 2011

Something Wrong in Norway

My grandfather had an amazing brain full of great jokes for every occasion.  Grandma could never keep up with him; she could never remember punchlines and frequently managed to mangle even the most common quotations.  She was trying to come up with the quote from Hamlet, the one about something rotten in Denmark, when she blurted out "Something wrong in Norway."  We never let her forget it; Grandma was our own Mrs. Malaprop.

Grandma tried to tell a joke once about a worm named Motor and the punchline was supposed to be "Out bored Motor!"   She got all mixed up and wondered why no one laughed at the end when she finished with "Out Motor bored!"  I think after that she left the jokes to Grandpa.

My mom, on the other hand, had a famous mondegreen.  She lived in South Buffalo as a child and misheard the line from the hymn "Jesus is seeking your humble heart" as "Jesus is sneaking through Humboldt Park."  She always wondered why Jesus would have had a need to do that and found herself looking over her shoulder whenever she had to walk through the park. 

My first mondegreen occurred when I was little and, listening to Up on the Rooftop, proudly declared that "Reindeer don't have paws, they have hooves."  For many years I also misheard the Winter Wonderland lyrics, "In the meadow we can build a snowman, Then pretend that he is Parson Brown," as "In the meadow we can build a snowman, Then pretend that he is parse and brown," which is really odd considering my dad was a preacher and I did not recognize the word parson.  I spent years wondering why a presumably white snowman would be parse and brown (I pictured a sort of  Charlie Brown scraggly snowman).

Only this week I discovered a mondegreen which has been rattling around in my brain since the early seventies.  My favorite album in the whole world is Fraser & DeBolt (with Ian Guenther) and in the song Waltze of the Tennis Players, one line had always puzzled me.  The correct lyric is "The cowboys are sprinkling mycelium. Mushrooms keep growing in every new bootprint."  I suppose the line about the mushrooms should have been my clue, but I always heard the word mycelium as two words, my celium, and I could not figure it out for the life of me. What the heck was a celium?  Many thanks to Allan Fraser for publishing the lyrics to all of the songs on the album. Now I can sleep.

I guess as the third generation (that I know of anyway) of proud perpetrators of malaprops, mispronunciations and mondegreens, it makes sense that I have a collection of not only my own family's aural bloopers, but also a selection of doozies I have heard on the radio and seen online. Some are unfortunately all too common:  road to hoe instead of row to hoe, bomb fire instead of bonfire, drug attics instead of drug addicts.   A recent addition to my collection is innocent bi-standard instead of innocent bystander.

A fill-in announcer on CBC once pronounced the northern Ontario town Attawapiskat as "Ottawa Piss Cat" and I can never hear any story about that town's terrible tragedies without thinking of that mispronunciation.

But these two are my all time favorites:  A teenager breathlessly described her new boyfriend as a "diamond in the rust."  Another young lady solemnly included in her narrative the phrase "a canary in a mine field."

We are all in good company here, so stay tuned.  I am sure there will always be more things wrong in Norway.

Portrait of Jenny (with apologies to Robert Nathan)

Jenny, Mr. Pugh, Gary, his dog and my dad's shadow

The faintest scent of sweet clover in the morning air sends me back in time to the Summer of '59.  That year we were able to rent a small dilapidated cottage in Lowbanks, Ontario for a whole week.  Right across the street from the pebbled beach and shining Lake Ontario.  We arrived long after dark (given my mother's aversion to riding in a car in the daylight) and located our musty beds without unpacking.

The next morning found my mom cleaning and straightening the shabby cottage, my dad blissfully eyeing the water, and me gazing across the weedy field to the farm next door where I spied Jenny.  A horse!  There was a horse next door!  I was so excited.

She was about as far away from The Black Stallion as a horse could get - she was terribly ancient, distressingly dusty, sway-backed and scarred.  But she was a horse!  And (for that week at least) she was mine, all mine.

The ragged and grizzled old farmer, rather aptly named Mr. Pugh, came out and must have seen the horse fever in my eyes.  He instructed me to gather the sweet clover from my side of her fence and present it to her.  He told me I would have a friend for life.  I don't even know how that mare could chew - her teeth were worn and yellowed, her lower lip hung down like an inner tube - but she eagerly devoured my offering and then seemingly drifted off into a state of equine  bliss.

Mr. Pugh was a working farmer.  He plowed with two horses, Jenny at age 32 and a feisty younger bay.  He did not use a tractor, he did not drive a car.  His ramshackle farmhouse was lit with kerosene lanterns and he cooked his meager meals on a coal stove. The story we later heard was that his wife had forbidden him to ever spend any of their money on "newfangled gadgets" and even after her death he kept his promise to her and lived his entire life like a homesteader. In the eighties I met a guy from Lowbanks; he told me that after Mr. Pugh died they found money stashed all over his house.

Of course I asked Mr. Pugh if I could ride Jenny and he apologized that he did not own a saddle, but he was kind enough to rig the harness reins on her bridle so, despite the blinders and the lack of saddle, I was able to "ride" her.  We spent many happy hours just moseying around her pasture; she went where she wanted to go and I was content to believe I was steering.  At least I know I was happy - I was on Cloud Nine and I like to think that she did not mind my presence as long as I kept her supplied with sweet clover.

During the week, Gary, a younger boy from the neighboring farm befriended me. He owned a very recalcitrant Shetland pony named Thunder, but he did not ride that pony as Thunder was not appreciative of being ridden.  While I am sure he thought I was quite insane, Gary rode Jenny with me sometimes.  Her bony back could have held three or four kids. 

My mother eventually persuaded me to "leave that poor horse alone" and my dad persuaded me to go in the water with him, but in that brief week I spent as many hours as I could with that sweet old soul.  When we returned to Lowbanks the following summer we found that my dear Jenny had gone on to horse heaven.

The scent of sweet clover will always bring to my mind the warm fragrance of that dusty old mare.  Rest in Peace dear Jenny.

When Wishes Were Horses (Part One)

Easter of 1958 found me, as I had been for years, in the throes of the unrequited love of horses.  I wanted a horse more than anything!  My dad told me he didn't think the parsonage committee would appreciate having a horse in the garage and I was partially mollified.

At the age of almost twelve, I had to satisfy myself with horse figurines and horse books.  My favorite book of all was Marguerite Henry's Album of Horses.  I took this out of the library as often as I was allowed (every once in a while the librarian convinced me to let someone else have a crack at signing it out).  I kept it for as long as it was possible and returned it again and again on the last possible day.

I spent hours and hours drinking in the glorious illustrations by Wesley Dennis.  The prancing Percheron, the leaping Lippizan, the amazing Arab.  I loved that book!

One day I was rummaging in the linen cupboard for a towel and what did I find but a brand new copy of Album of Horses tucked in amongst the towels.  I was flushed with excitement but deeply chagrined to have unearthed this awesome secret.  I tucked it carefully back into its hiding place.  Mom and dad would ever know I had made this discovery;  I would feign surprise at the presentation.

It was only years later that mom confided to me that they knew instantly that I had found the book when I returned the library copy before its due date!

The Great Escape

Grabbing my stuff, I walked out the door at noon, happy to be slightly ahead of schedule to meet my cousin and her husband at the senior care home where my step mom lives.  We were planning a pleasant visit, their first in a number of years.  I locked the back door, went down the back steps and out onto the gravel pathway to my car.

To my absolute shock I was greeted by young Fletcher coming around the corner.  Behind him skittered young Prince Mica; both had frantic expressions.  How on earth had they gotten out of the enclosure?

Twenty odd years ago I had built a sturdy and roomy chicken wire enclosure for my cats to be able to enjoy the great outdoors with no dangers of said great outdoors - racoons, coyotes, cars.  They have 24/7 access to this marvel though a series of catdoors, and tunnels.  Over the years I have reinforced and upgraded this enclosure (corrugated polycarbonate roof, carpeted shelving and cat tree, several perches, cat toys) - and I have checked it regularly especially in the spring to make sure no openings have appeared.  

To my great shock, today I discovered this hole under the porch - the hardware cloth had been ripped away from the post - from the inside by the kitties or from the outside by a raccoon?  Either way freaked me out.

By the time I made this horrifying discovery, Fletcher and Mica had come 'round the back, and I propped the back door open, hoping they would just go back into the house.  This was not to be, however, they had never gone in or out through this door on their paws - only in a carrier.  They were totally unfamiliar with the concept of a door.

I began to hope they would just go back into the enclosure through the hole, but they were too scared because they must have thought I was mad at them.  They just kept darting back and forth through the undergrowth.  Mica was especially freaked.

I went back into the house and got some catfood.  I hoped to entice them.  By this time I decided it would not be a great idea to keep the back door open, I did not want to lose anyone else.  I later discovered a tuft of orange fur on the edge of the hole - meaning Leto had been availing himself of this new-found freedom.

I was running back and forth through the house, gathering up staples and a hammer to seal the hole.  But I realized that sealing the hole would mean Fletcher and Mica would be unable to crawl back into the enclosure.  On one of my frenzied trips I saw Fletcher scuttling around the corner - inside the house!  Thank God!

But now I had to try to coax poor distraught Mica back in.  I circled the house, inside and out, calling, coaxing, begging.  I looked everywhere - and had no idea what to do next -how could I leave my littlest man outside all alone and scared?  Yet if I sealed up the escape route, he would not be able to return to the safety of the house.  And I certainly did not want any of the others to disappear.

I scoured every closet, under every piece of furniture, all the time growing more crazed.  I was regretting not micro-chipping the kittens when I had been given the opportunity.  

On my last frenetic trip down the hallway, I glance into the kitchen - and there, standing wide-eyed by the feeding station, was Mica.  I guess a tiny coal-black kitty who is scared enough can melt into the woodwork when he does not wish to be found.  But who cares where he was hiding?

My kitty boys were all safe and inside!  WHEW!!!  Thank you Bastet! 

I stapled the hardware cloth shut and reinforced it with a large piece of aluminum flashing, both nailed and wired into place.

Tomorrow I secure the perimeter and maybe add another layer of hardware cloth or chicken wire; if it was a raccoon trying to get in to do my kitties harm, I am going to make sure he is stopped in his tracks.

I am so happy that everyone is safe and secure and would you believe, I arrived at my original destination only a half hour late and my cousin arrived five minutes afterwards.  We had a lovely afternoon.

Leto, Fletcher, and Prince Mica.

Serious Moonlight

Silence.  Serious moonlight.  The night Fort Erie went dark (Power company turned off all power to the municipality for 8 hours to accomplish critical repairs).  The night of the hugest full moon.  No arc lights, no porch lights.  No traffic lights. (No traffic)  No street lights.  From the loudest band in the smallest bar, Cinco de Mayo in full absurd swing on Allen Street and Electrorespect 5 at Nietzsche’s (Girl Power!!!) (chocolate chip cookies and friends); ears ringing, traffic on the streets and sidewalks, everywhere noisy drunks, flashing cop lights, loudness and brightness.  Cruising along the thruway – little traffic but brightly lit, everywhere I look.   Following the moon, or is it following me?

 

Crossing the Peace Bridge, looking to Canada – shoreline is inky blackness banded by moonlight – one inspection lane open, generator echoing in the chill night mist – minimum lighting in buildings, no light from the gigantic fixtures – and then no lights in Fort Erie at all.

Reflections from street signs and numbers and hazard stripes and who knew stop lights were surrounded by bright orange reflective rectangles?  Nothing open; no gas stations, no restaurants, no Timmy’s!

My street – no light at all – except my astonishingly brilliant brights and the even brighter moon.  Silence, except for muffled roar of the big transport trailers on the QEW.  I hear them when I am out on the porch with the tripod trying to capture the moon.  Only sound inside my house the answering machine, inexplicably hissing even after unplugging both the power and the phone jack.  Kitties little shadowy forms, materializing here and there, puzzled by the lack of sound and light and me awake at 4am – wondering perhaps about the warm flickering of the oil lamps and the cold light of the LED lantern.

Loud purring.  Keys clicking.  Soft hissing (muffled under a sheepskin scuff).  No radio, no Internet, no Facebook!!!  (OMG)  I am wide awake.  Customs lady said it was creepy, no lights, darkness surrounding the plaza.  I find it mystical, magical, marvelous – and most everyone else is sleeping sound(less)ly.  I am wide awake.

As quiet as it usually is in my lovely woods (dark and deep), I use the flashlight to find batteries for the portable radio.  Too quiet, too quiet.  Tune in BBC.  Eat a few of Carla’s Tootsie Rolls, brush my teeth, and feed the cats so I can sleep longer.   Battery fading on the laptop.  Go to bed, to sleep, perchance to dream….of the serious moonlight.

Dancing with Myself (Uh-oh)

All of my life I have wrestled with a sort of love/hate relationship with dancing.  It began in first grade when my mother enrolled me into a ballet class even though I had been desperately petitioning for tap.  No, no – she dreamed of me as a ballerina.  (She so wanted me to be a real girl…)  The culmination of this horror show was a recital in a very scratchy pale blue tutu and wherein, as the tallest in the group, I had the supreme pleasure of leading our wobbly line onto the stage.

 

Mom had made a matching tutu for my little teddy cat, and it was after my first epiphany that I announced to her, “His name is Cowboy and He is a Boy!”

I also had the delight of coming down with measles the night of the recital and my sweet revenge was infecting many of the rest of the dancers.

Fast forward to seventh grade.  I was at a party at my best friend Marcia’s house and we were listening to music in her backyard.  "The Bunny Hop" came on and we gathered in a circle to dance.  As I was hopping around happily, Marcia, with the unconscious cruelty of a pre-teen, said to me, “You dance like a horse.”

I stopped dancing immediately and never resumed until the advent of Chubby Checker.  The Twist was fairly easy to do, even for me – stand in one spot and move only from the waist up.

 

Dance fell away for a couple of years after that – I watched Bandstand but never attempted to learn any of the popular dances.  I just loved the music.

When I was a sophomore, I was invited to the Junior Prom by a friend from my art class.  He was very socially awkward (think Sheldon Cooper crossed with Ichabod Crane) and I did not want to have anything to do with the stupid prom, but, alas – my mother made me say yes.  My girlfriend Ruth and I were double dating for this event, and we bought matching bright green wool sheath dresses.  My mother was horrified but hey, at least I was going to the prom.

No members of my family had ever danced that I knew of, but my mother decided to teach me how to Cha-Cha.  The only record I owned that was a Cha-Cha was “Down by the Station” and we played it over and over on the console stereo in the parsonage living room.  One, two, cha-cha-cha.  Three, four, cha-cha-cha.

 

Luckily, my date’s desire to dance was even less than mine (I do not recall that we danced at all) and although I was maneuvered into one slow dance with my Sunday School teacher’s very short young son (could he really have been wearing his Scout uniform?), Ruth and I hid giggling in the girl’s bathroom most of the evening; then we all left early and went bowling.

A boy from church invited me to my own Junior Prom and I declined, and then, the following year, a Future Farmer asked me to the Senior Prom and I turned him down as well.  So that was the end of dancing in high school.

Dance reared its ugly head again in 1979 – I was 33 years old and had become a devotee of the late night cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Our ragged little group of would-be thespians performed in synch with the movie every Friday and Saturday for the midnight show.  Several times I had the misfortune of attempting to portray Magenta and that required doing the "Time Warp" on the slanting sticky floor in front of the screen at the Granada Theater.  I retired after two performances in which I nearly tipped over.

In 1981 I was introduced to The Continental and discovered that on their dance floor, no actual dancing was required.  Jumping around or swaying pretty much covered every situation, from the DJ upstairs to the bands on stage downstairs.  One night I was upstairs swaying to Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” and some punk in engineer boots stomped on my foot.  I was rescued by Michael, who has been one of my best friends ever since.

Another incident comes to mind.  My friends and I were attending Sandy’s wedding reception and one dear old friend asked me to dance.  I demurred, telling him that I did not know how to dance.  He dragged me out on the floor and started to (try to) dance with me.  I had no idea what to do.  He stopped after a few missteps and remarked, “Wow, you really don’t know how to dance, do you?”

I’m afraid I’ll have to admit it – I ain’t no dancer.  Leonard Cohen will just have to take his waltz and dance someone else to the end of love.

The Summer of '59

Grandma and Grandpa had a beautiful backyard garden with narrow grassy pathways and about enough “lawn” for a couple of chairs and the rotary drier.  Grandma took care most of the flowers – black-eyed susans, peonies, lily of the valley, forget-me-nots, bleeding hearts, day lilies, iris, glads, snapdragons, trumpet vines, hens and chickens, jack-in-the-pulpit, lamb’s ears and ferns.  More flowers than I can remember – the garden bloomed all summer long!  Grandpa tended three things:  his roses, his tomatoes and his compost heap.  There was a wild brambly red raspberry bush which yielded a small handful of treats each season.  Strawberries too, in sweet juicy abundance.

It was a delightful English garden, Grandpa puttering around and Grandma and I sitting in the sun reading (she read about flowers, I read about horses) and painting (she painted flowers, I painted horses).  My entire childhood revolved around these special weekends and summers in this garden.

Once each summer came a wondrous event.  The fire hall was about four doors away, and the firemen put on a carnival for a day or two, located on the other side of the unkempt hedges and tall old trees ringing the garden.  It was magical – strings of lights, cotton candy, games of chance and skill, small rides, and wall-to-wall people!  People came from miles around – kids, teenagers, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas.  Of course, some people parked on Grandma’s flowers and drove over the bushes and bumped into the trees, which always made Grandpa angry, but, heck – it was only two days a year.

My grandmother and I were strolling through the carnival one evening when I saw him – and I thought for a moment it was James Dean.  Skinny blue jeans, white tee shirt, ducktail haircut.  He was the very image of wild rebellious youth and my heart skipped a beat.   It was love at first sight.  I was 13 years old.

 
I had seen Rebel Without a Cause when I was 9, Elvis was my favorite singer, and Edd “Kookie” Burns was my TV heartthrob on 77 Sunset Strip.  And here he was, practically in my grandma’s back yard!  I followed him through the carnival as best I could with Grandma in tow, and caught tantalizing glimpses.  Later I saw him drive away in his convertible, top down in the sultry summer night.  I wrote down his license plate number.

Thus began my little adventure.  I wrote to the license bureau, told them my girlfriend had a crush on this guy with this license plate on his car but she was too shy to do anything about it so I was doing her a favor and could they please send his name and address?  Astonishingly enough, they did.

After much pondering, I sat down and wrote him a letter.  I told him that my girlfriend, Linda Russell (I made up both the name and the girlfriend), had seen him at the carnival and thought he looked really nice and she wondered if he would be willing to meet her.  I told him the location (the firemen’s road next to my Grandma’s back yard) and picked a date and time when I knew I could be there.

The days passed in alternating paroxysms of sheer terror and wild excitement.  I could hardly wait to get to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.  By the time the weekend arrived I was beside myself.   As the appointed hour approached I was crouched in the high back bathroom window which had the best view of the laneway.  When I saw his car drive up, I nearly jumped out of my skin and I clattered down the narrow crooked stairway and bolted through the kitchen and out the back door into the garden; then I attempted to emerge unruffled and serene on the other side of the tangled shrubbery to meet my dreamboat face to face.

He had left his engine on and his muffler was roaring like a jet engine.  He was leaning up against the car and he looked puzzled when he saw me.  Dirty words had been painted all over his car in crude black lettering, and I was mortified to see him up close in the glaring sunlight.  His hair was too greasy, his face was lined, and some of his teeth were missing, his clothing was soiled.  He was ugly!  He was old!  (Probably at least 25!)

I calmly told him Linda had been unable to meet him that day because she was sick, and she had sent me to tell him.  He apologized to me about the graffiti on his car, told me his friends had pulled a prank on him.  With these apologies exchanged, he got back in his car and rumbled away.

When I reemerged into the now-quiet sanctity of the garden, Grandma was coming down the back steps.  “Who was that, dear?” she asked innocently.  “He just wanted some directions, Grandma.”  “Oh, alright, dear.”

I never told a soul about this incident – if my mother had found out she would have had kittens and I would have been grounded for life. If Grandpa had ever found out he would have had a coronary.   It is only in retrospect that I realize how lucky I had been, coming away unscathed from my first attempted “walk on the wild side.”  The guy was probably just a grease monkey but he could just as easily have been an axe murderer.  I returned to drawing horses for several more years before I again ventured forth into the wild uncharted world of boys.