This Monday Elihu had a day off from school on account of Columbus Day and the weather was absolutely fine. We took off for downtown, just five miles from our country home, to take advantage of the tourists that would no doubt be strolling Broadway. Elihu was in a mood to play, and besides he wanted to make a few bucks to put towards the cost of supplies for his Archaeopteryx costume (that mom has yet to make).
We were so happy, so ready for this fine fall day that I kinda forgot all about my parent’s 52nd wedding anniversary. Oops. My dad himself didn’t know the occasion (Alzheimer’s kinda gloms the days together for him) so the day passed as any other. It wouldn’t be like my mother to remind anyone (not sure if it’s the 50s era ‘mother as martyr’ thing or what), so it went unrecognized. Maybe it’s because I always insist we all go out to dinner – and it’s mom who ends up paying. At least she got out of paying a hefty tab if nothing else. (My pitch for going out to a fine dinner is this: I claim the event will be fondly remembered for years to come but the bill will not, making it worth the one-time expense.) Regardless, I feel pretty lousy about forgetting the date. 10/10, how easy is that to remember?! Oh well.
Happily, we had a wonderful outside day full of fresh air and sunshine, music, dog-smooching and people-meeting. Elihu made $40, and we stashed $20. The house rule is “save half”. So half towards the Halloween fund, half for the bank (or the credit union, I should say. !) Here Elihu busks for some dancing babies, then he shares the sidewalk with cigar-chomping old-timers…
A disappointing post-script:
After waiting some twenty minutes for a two minute video to upload to this post, I was finally told that this file type (‘avi’) was not accepted due to security reasons. Huh? What to do now? It’s the only format my videos are in, and it’s never been a problem before. Can I save the file in another, acceptable format? Man. How deflating.
Hopefully in future I’ll have some cute vids here. Meantime, I think I’ll see if I can upload them to Facebook. My computer illiteracy is driving me crazy. If I’d ever thought my handicap was in any way endearing before, I certainly don’t think anything of the sort now. Just wish I knew how to catch myself up… Those classes at the library don’t come close. Sigh.
Instead of video, here is a nice snapshot of the day…
Being a mother is a hard-working job. It’s non-stop and requires a certain finesse.
Tonite it’s a rooster in the house and sessions at the desk trying to get the bird’s likeness on paper – assisting my colorblind son to choose the most realistic colors – to the bath that must follow this after-dinner project. Watch out for poops on the floor. Where’s King George? Our dear little button quail is somewhere upstairs. Hopefully our cat Mina is uninterested in him. Hopefully. (“I come in peace, I come in peace, you can relax, I am coming to be with you in peace, to know your soul, I’m coming in peace…” Elihu sings to his rooster) Now I must create a loving and flawless transition to the bath upstairs. Then bedtime. (“I come to warm your soul and to warm the soul of the earth…”) I must keep things soft, gentle and unhurried if I can – oh how will this unfold tonite?? It is all so good in this moment, but at what moment will it turn an about-face? Will Linda Blair visit tonite? Or will we make it? (“I come to warm the face of planet earth, I come in peace, sit and relax and do not worry, I come in peace. I mean no harm. I really don’t. Sit and relax by my side…”)
Elihu’s song to his rooster continues, and I ready myself for the transition to bedtime.
I could never have imagined myself here a few years back. At the start of my married life I just kind of thought my path was to unfold in Evanston, in my beloved mid century home by the lake. I will admit however, that even then a dim idea existed in the recesses of my mind that the path immediately before me seemed potentially a rather dull life. A pretty one – beautiful house, lovely neighborhood and all the aesthetic details in place – but if mom to two, if no more gigs, if wife of touring musician, then it would certainly be fairly domestic. And I’d readied myself for that. I remember fall, six years ago, when I was pregnant. I remember Fareed and me taking our young old son trick or treating in our lovely neighborhood under a cathedral of elm trees. I can remember the voices of the families echoing between the houses, I can remember the secret my husband and I carried with us that night. It was a moment full of hope, of wonder that we too were pregnant again, we too would be a family like all the others we passed that night. I remember it feeling all very surreal, truly like I was walking through a dream. As Elihu and Fareed walked up the steps and rang doorbells I watched the other young mothers and fathers who passed us on the sidewalk. I remember feeling like they all belonged to this strange club that I was somehow joining despite the fact that I felt I had nothing in common with them. Nothing except having young children. Even so, I was excited in a deep, mysterious way about this new life growing inside of me. It felt unreal. I could not imagine myself the mother of two children. Seriously, me, mom of two? Was I ready? I needn’t have worried. Shortly after Thanksgiving I miscarried.
Fast forward a bit and I’m living in Dekalb, running a nightclub. This too felt surreal – like a life meant for someone else, but not for me. As much as I could make it look fairly satisfying on paper, it just wasn’t satisfying in my heart. I’d so hoped that somehow our move to the rural outskirts of metro Chicago would help us to slow down and merge more intimately as a family. After two years of what I then considered a waste of my precious life (and clock) we ended our role as nightclub owners. ‘Finally’, I thought. Now we can get back to our life. Now we’re finally ready. Now we’ll have that second child. I thought I knew what I wanted, but apparently the universe knew what I needed and shortly thereafter proceeded to give it to me.
Fast forward a couple more years and here I am. In my cozy, tidy home in he country. After a good meal and a glass of wine I retire to the piano to play some Bach, the fireplace glowing and the house warm with the feeling of family. Fareed is in Elihu’s room going over homework with him. It is the three of us again. It’s a short visit, as it usually is, and it will go too fast. For tonight our son is the kind of happy he only gets when we three are together. Finally he has his mother and his father at the same time, in the same place. There are many who wonder why I allow Fareed to stay here with us if he’s treated us so poorly; why don’t I just make him stay at a hotel? In part, it’s because of this. Because in these brief windows of time we are some kind of family. I wasn’t always able to enjoy it as I am now; in the beginning of our life here I felt a queer mixture of comfort and heartbreak when he visited. And when he’d drive off, my eyes would cloud with tears, my heart still unable to understand. Thankfully, time does diminish the pain and it transforms your perspective. Time, plus the stink of man pee in your toilet. (Boy pee I can deal with – somehow it’s not as offensive. Messy and off-target perhaps, but somehow more endearing – well, maybe that’s not quite the right word – and forgivable. Sisters, can I get a witness?) So. That also makes his leaving a little easier.
Another nice thing about having Daddy here is that having a third person in the house really does add an extra energy, it adds life to the place for sure. I do wish he could visit longer than a day here and there, spread months apart. Elihu began to cry this morning when he realized that his father would be gone again tomorrow. “Why can’t I have a Daddy who lives with us like a real family?” he sobbed to me. Not a thing I can say. I can just remember what a good life we have here, and indeed how different and how much less full it would have been had we stayed in the midwest. All I have to do is just picture it for a minute, and I’m able to stay the course.
Just what would our life have looked like had we stayed in Chicago? A garden apartment in Rogers Park, no piano playing in the evenings, no drum set to practice at home, no animals, no money, no car, no grandparents next door… lots of ‘no‘. I would have been full of resentment had I stayed there. Quality of life is everything, and it’s easier to have a good quality of life on far less money out here. Knowing this as surely as I do now, I can offer my compassion for his sorrow and help him ride it out til his heart recovers. I understand the feeling well.
In spite of the crap that my almost ex has caused us, in spite of the Lordly way in which he continues to deny his responsibility, I cannot help myself; I relish those cozy moments with all three of us tidily tucked into our corners of the house. Tonight will be the second and final night of this visit. I still have mixed feelings; strangely, this role of father has become normal in some way. And I’m better with it now. I guess three years of having the bed all to myself has helped convince me. That and the man pee thing. And the blackberry to the ear all the time thing. And the calls to his girlfriend in front of me thing. You know. Those little reminders that say ‘hey, Elizabeth, remember that? Don’t worry, you’ll have the place all to yourselves again tomorrow”…
Poverty or not, father in the house or not, we still have a nice life here in our corner of the world. Yes, if we had our druthers things might not be as they are, yet I humble myself to the path the universe has put before me. Clearly I wasn’t headed in the right direction. What have I learned on this new course? Humility is probably the biggest lesson, and I’m always working on it. Self-reliance, self-respect and self-love are also on the list. The self-effacing thing might work well in a stand-up routine but it aint quite as effective in real life. And I might want to roll up my sleeves and begin to face this poverty-consciousness demon head on one of these days. But not today. Maybe tomorrow.
For now, I’m just going to go outside and watch my son and his father play in the fall leaves. I’m going to sink as fully into the moment as I can, and offer my gratitude for the opportunity to do so.
We live on a hill. The tops of the trees descend down its steep banks revealing a view of the lands beyond and to the southeast. There are two main layers to the many subtle strata of horizons; the darker ridge in the foreground are the low-lying hills just to the east of the Hudson river, the paler profile behind are the much larger Green Mountains of southern Vermont. I love to look out over the vast scape and contemplate the land on the ‘other side’. I picture the countryside’s bucolic scenes, the tiny farms and undulating topography. I don’t often have reason to drive there, for it’s a haul just to reach the foothills – a commitment of 50 miles there and back – so when I have a quest east of the Hudson, my heart quickens at the thought.
Yesterday, Elihu and I had a reason to cross the wide river valley and explore the hills beyond. I should have been excited, but I was not. It was raining and I’d forgotten my hat, I’d not slept more than three hours the night before and I discovered my driver’s license was not in my pocket but probably still at home in my purse (farmer business does not include a purse; important items are transferred to the interior ‘man’ pocket of my farm jacket). After having a little talk with myself, pointing out how there was no benefit to remaining angry, I managed to coax myself out of the pissy mood that had been incubating for the first ten miles of our wet commute. This was our Big Day, and I’d do us both right by just dropping it and welcoming the adventure that awaited us on the other side of the Hudson. We were going to the Fall tailgate poultry sale at the Schaghticoke (say SCA tih coke) fair grounds to find hens for our red golden pheasant, Timothy, whom we’d just purchased the week before. As she does quite often for us, the angel of serendipity came to our assistance that night as we stared in disbelief at our new avian acquisition by placing one Jim De Graff, former zoo owner and breeder of exotic pheasants, in our path. He’d told us about the bird sale this weekend. We were lucky; this event happened just twice a year. He was nearly 100% sure we’d find just what we were looking for. That he could be so sure that we’d find these hens was an indication to me that we were in for some serious, bird-intense sub-culture. We’d waited anxiously all week this very morning. This very rainy morning. Oh well, this was going to be fun no matter what I’d forgotten to bring, no matter what the weather. As Elihu sat in the back seat enthusiastically playing air drums to the radio, his face radiating joy, I began to lighten up too.
Driving south on State Route 40 from Greenwich to Schaghticoke is like driving through a model train set layout. The farms are tidy, complete with outbuildings and vintage tractors, hooved animals and ponds. There is a new scene to be admired around every curve, at the crest and valley of every hill, plus each scene has an expansive view to the west of the great Hudson river valley lands beyond. The forested hills rise to our left as we continue south towards the mysterious convocation of bird lovers. The road winds and winds. Elihu, not usually a child who asks ‘when will we be there?’ (as he thrives on the times when he’s left to live in imagination, something his near-sighted eyes promote on long car trips) finally does. Thankfully, I spy the town’s water tower ahead, and I can tell him we’re almost there.
When we pull in to the fair grounds, we see a makeshift village of tents and awnings. I’d hoped the event might be indoors, and later I discover some of it is, but the bird sales are out in the open. Hmm. Just how wet will we be getting? I wonder. Looking around the car, I find a broken dollar store umbrella and so no longer lament my missing hat. Elihu throws his hood up, we park in the first space of grass we see, and we’re out the door.
Each vendor has backed his vehicle to the gravel drive, rows of cages and boxes spread out on the grass. The breeds are identified by hand-written labels now folding in on themselves in the rain. Some birds are sheltered by newspapers on top of their cages, some are not. Ducks crowd into the corners of their wire cages sopping up the new puddles with a rapid-fire quivering of their bills. The most elegant breeds of chickens are sodden and sorry looking. Thankfully, the customers here can see past the cosmetic handicaps that the day has cast on these birds; every last person here knows his birds, dry or wet. Just like us, everyone here has come looking for a bird, most folks for one specific breed in particular. The very first tent we come upon has game birds of some sort. Two round women in their later years sit on old fashioned lawn chairs while their cigarette smoking husbands in red and black checkered flannel shirt jackets stand in front, greeting passersby. I wonder if it could possibly be this easy. It’s not a huge place, but there have to be at least thirty vendors. As we get closer, I can see these birds are in the right neighborhood – the shape is close, their movements are quick and timid… Could these be young pheasants? I tell the smoking man what we’re looking for. “Red Golden Pheasant hens, two of ’em.” He didn’t miss a beat, nor did he seem overly satisfied with himself that he just so happened to have two Red Golden hens right here in this box. “What?” I asked. “Red Goldens“, I repeated. “That’s what we’re looking for. And hens.” Yeah, he’d heard me. And they were, as he said, right here in this box. I peered in, and saw four brown somethings. Game birds, for sure. Females probably. “I got a Cinnamon too” he offered, holding the flaps open so I could get a better look. Wow. This was the place. Seriously, it was this easy? I asked the price, he told me $15 apiece. I remembered being advised not to pay more than $10 a head. I surveyed the grounds and wondered if there might not be dozens more red golden hens out there. But this was so perfect, and I was just talking about $10 here… I told the man I was interested, but had to look around for a bit. So Elihu and I went off to learn what this thing was all about.
We soon figured out the deal. While there was just about every type of outdoor domestic bird available for sale there, we noticed that there were not quite as many of some, and rather a glut of others. Some vendors had even sold their whole lot by this time and were packing up and heading out. I didn’t want to blow the whole reason for our trip, plus if we just got the hens bought and safely stowed in the car, then we were free to explore. Before we got too far into the flooded grounds, I turned back for the car. I told Elihu to wait at the pheasant man’s tent, I’d be back. I pulled up, paid for the gals and presented the farmer with our luxurious dog-sized kennel in the back. He wrestled the hens from the box, and placed them inside. They were a lot smaller than I realized, their bodies about ten inches long. There were so many questions I’d wanted to ask, but the rain had started up again and I just felt rushed. “They look young, our guy is mature already. Will that be ok?” I shouted over the noise. He nodded and assured me they’d be fine mates. Not much more I could do but continue with the adventure as it swept me along. There was more to see, more to learn, and as I’ve been saying to my dear son since he can remember “you never know until you go”. What we didn’t know about breeding pheasants we would learn as we went along.
I parked the car again and we were free to enjoy the rest of the morning. It seemed the breeds of the day were the Banties. Many vendors had them and lots of folks wandered through the grounds with the sweet-looking chickens in the crooks of their elbows. I guess the appeal of these miniature breeds is that they’re portable, easy-going and make nice pets. Elihu was able to smooch a few of these as they passed by. He was in heaven. In his element. Finally surrounded by people who felt just like him about birds. As a mother, you can imagine how pleased and thankful my heart was as I followed behind my son, watching him stop at each new cage as if it were the only reason we’d come. He was fit to burst and after a while I could not keep up with his wanderings. I’d stop to chat with folks, my quest for information on birds turning more into short interviews: Did these sales actually net them money? (No, not really.) Is this your business? (The layers pay for the rest of em.) Do you do this for a living? (Oh no – I’ve got a real job.) Is this a hobby? (Yes! No one here’s makin any money. This is a hobby. And it takes money!) Well then. I learned something important, that this was a hobby, not a rent-payer. Kinda discouraging (I’d begun to count my exotic pheasant chicks before they were hatched. Think of the money we could make selling them! Piece of cake!) and yet the bit about the layers was good to hear. Our layers had once made us money – until we began to lose them. Layers, wait… We need layers! I was shaken out of my bird-daze and came to my senses. We needed layers, and where better to find em then here? Screw the auction house! This was the fountainhead! I told Elihu our new agenda and we set off on our new quest.
After scouring the entire grounds we found but one vendor who had suitable laying hens. She had two fine looking Aracaunas, one single Barred Rock and a bunch of dark colored Leghorns. Five apiece for the Leghorns? Wow. Seemed we’d found a really good deal. As I learned from the woman selling a pair of Mute Swans, birds you buy at the auction house are likely to be questionable; sick perhaps, behaviorally challenged or some such deficit, usually the very reason they’re being sold to begin with. Here, these were all breeders, folks who sold healthy and well-loved birds. It made sense to buy our layers here if we could. It seemed we’d found our girls. The booth was just across from the food stand, and I thought it might be good if we had some lunch before we wrapped things up. If I hadn’t known it before, I learned it then. Not a good move. Shoulda paid for those birds to secure them before I walked off. After a quick lunch (I ate, he didn’t’) we returned to find the Leghorns gone. Elihu started to sniffle. While it is true that this is a breed he’s long talked about wanting, I still didn’t see the need for tears. Besides, if nothing else, this event had taught me a lesson, which made it worth the loss. Pay for something as soon as you know you want it. Got it. Next time. But for now we weren’t entirely let down; there were four fine hens remaining, two of which were the lovely looking Aracaunas. We paid for them and Elihu begged to move them himself – from the cage to our back seat bin. Elizabeth, the woman at the vegetable/hen stand easily agreed, and when she saw how handily Elihu removed the hens, restrained them, and transported them to his box she complimented him warmly. I watched, proud of my boy. If you’ve ever tried to handle and move a bird, you’ll get it. If you haven’t, all I can say is it’s a gift. Natural to some, unthinkable to others. Definitely takes a knack.
After placing our new hens in the car, I’d tried to back up and retrace our route, but a line of cars behind me changed that plan. Instead, I drove forward along the perimeter of the grounds, and we passed some more stands we’d not seen yet. Finding space on the lawn, I parked again so that we could make one last walkabout before taking our hens home. A long-haired woman stood beside a handful of cages in which a couple of ducks, a fuzzy miniature chicken and one very cramped goose stood in the rain, waiting to go home. I love a duck, I really do, so I just had to spend some time cooing to these guys. Elihu too loves a duck and in fact had talked for several weeks about having a Muscovy duck instead of a dog. We’d long felt an undefinable absence in our home (not filled by a parrot – we tried that – and for Elihu’s allergies unable to be satisfied by a cat) and had thought perhaps – especially since Elihu was eight – this was the right time for us to get a dog. While the idea seemed pleasing, it just didn’t sit right with me – or him. So, he’d somehow settled on the idea of Muscovy duck. We searched the internet for “Muscovy duck as pet” and found a story of a particularly endearing pet Muscovy duck named Archimedes which seemed to confirm for us that this was a definite possibility. So I had to visit the ducks. There was even a Runner duck – the strangest looking duck you ever did see. Long and thin necks, almost vertical as they stand, they just don’t look possible. While I love all creatures and find Runners interesting, I’m not a huge fan. And they certainly don’t look, well, pet-like. Smoochable. Whatever it is that makes a pet a companion and not just another animal. Then I catch eyes with someone. A large head cocks to the side and a marble-blue, orange-rimmed eye looks up at me. “A goose?” I ask, knowing it’s a goose, but waiting for the story that comes with it. “He’s the only American Lavender Ice you’ll find anywhere around here” she offers, beginning to fill me in.
My experience with geese is that they are not very nice. Definitely not smoochable. Not an animal you want to get your fingers anywhere near. However, this guy’s been bred to be friendly. See? She inserts a finger into the cage and wiggles it into his back. He seems to like it. ? This is a first. “He won’t bite me??” I ask, still very hesitant to test her on it. She assures me, laughing. I tentatively move a finger toward his bill. Not much happens. He ignores it, in fact. Really? Another first. I let her talk a bit about him, his breed, what makes him so unique. While that’s all good to know, what I want to know is is he really friendly, I mean really friendly? As in ‘companion-to-an-eight-year-old-boy’ friendly? She assures me. She goes on to tell me that her best friend growing up was a goose named ‘Lucy’. I say, yeah, fine, but a boy? A gander? Males play rough, right? She goes on to tell me that years later she was to learn that Lucy was actually a gander! (They re-named him ‘Lucipher’ because he didn’t like a certain guy in the neighborhood… I kinda let that one pass; it didn’t add to her pitch, and frankly, by now I wanted to be sold on this creature). His eyes, oh his eyes. The same sort of look as a duck, only more substance promised to live behind them. Or so I hoped. Geese lived long, right? Twenty years, some. They get along with chickens? Sure do. They used em as sentries in WWI, would they do the same for me? Yup, they guard the flock, ward off foxes, raccoons. Are you sure he doesn’t bite? Sure. I stood there just looking at him. Elihu danced around, telling me why he had to have the other ducks, beginning to create his campaign for bringing home a final, unplanned member of the flock. Little did he know I was way ahead of him.
“Ok.” I said. “I’ll take him.” Two other birders looked on and nodded approvingly as they stroked the Banties they held in their arms, telling me they’d do it too if they only could. (I could, right? Again, quick mental list – I’d told her about our accommodations and she’d thought they were fine) really, could we? Really? Wow. Who was piloting this ship?? Had I been overtaken by an irrational alter-ego?? Ok, I’d bought an exotic pheasant last week, his mates this week, a car full of hens, yeah ok, but a GOOSE?
“Oh ho! Oh boy!” Elihu leaped into the air and ran to the goose’s cage. “Max!!” he shouted, “you’re coming home with us!”. Max? Sure, why not? Everyone laughed. Kim, the woman who’d sold us the goose, had kindly offered to throw the tiny Silkie rooster in with the deal. She didn’t want to go back home with a rooster (yeah, I hear ya sister). She insisted that Elihu could show this lil guy in his 4H group at the fair – he could easily take the $100 blue ribbon prize. While that wasn’t necessarily a selling point for me (but still mildly compelling), the idea of a tiny bird that Elihu could easily take around with him – perhaps in the crook of his arm at the next fair in spring – was just icing on the cake. Why not? The little fluffy white chicken was docile, sweet and accommodating. Kinda like the bird version of a toy poodle. Perfect. Throw him in the car with the rest of em. Oh heck, he can ride on your lap, why not. After locating a box and shifting the cargo around some (again, praise for Elihu’s deft maneuvering of animals) we were ready to go.
Somewhere inside, I had a feeling our lives had changed forever. I went to Kim and hugged her – in light of the way she’d contributed to the new direction of our lives it felt absolutely natural. Whether the result of her effortless sales pitch or the next step of our destiny encouraged by subtle forces, our lives were now different, our family now larger.
Duck? No. Duck? No. Goose? Why not….
Elihu and Maximus
Post Script: While animal’s names are usually something we like to sit with for awhile and often don’t choose until after an animal has lived with us for a bit , ‘Max’ just seemed perfect from the first moment Elihu said it. His full name is Maximus, and it fits as he is the largest member of our flock.
Visualizing the things we want is a good way to get the ball rolling, right? By now it’s pretty widely accepted in our world that this is so. A bridge exists first in someone’s thoughts, then step by step it becomes physical reality as the dream – the visualization – fuels its creation. As more and more people’s energies (as well as their own visualizations of this wonderful bridge) come together, the thing begins to take ‘real’ form. But the bridge’s first form was that of thought. Thought, in the form of one person’s visualization.
I’ve been explaining this idea to my son since he was five – and he gets it. He also gets by now that this is quite an infuriating planet on which to bring dreams or thoughts into physical fruition. Yup, this place can be a big pain in the ass. And so it can be rather daunting to even begin to dream. It’s even kind of painful; it’s sad, defeating and exhausting to vainly picture scenes in your head which are, judging by your present surroundings, quite unlikely to come true. But then again, in the face of such grim reality, the faint message comes through: somehow, it is possible. Like that saying ‘if you can conceive it and believe it you can achieve it’. These days I’m having a hard time dreaming, because I just can’t seem to find the oomph to try bringing anything into form. Nevertheless wispy visions continue to lap at the edges of my thoughts…
Those endless wires overhead. Ever notice them? I guess I’d never paid them much attention before because they’re just simply part of our earthly landscape, whether it’s Miami or New Delhi. But lately I’ve started to notice them. To think about them. To see that they are not just in every city and hamlet where folks use electricity – but they further clutter rural lawns and backyards where the lines spoke off and make for their disembarking points on our rooftops. That is, for those of us whose lines aren’t buried, and I do realize there are a fair number of those unseen lines beneath the feet of some lucky communities. But for those of us who get our electricity through the more economic delivery method of above ground wires, those things are just everywhere. They’re so ubiquitous that I doubt you’ve ever begun to imagine the world without them. I myself never had until recently.
As I was driving down my country road the other day, enjoying the picturesque unrolling of the road ahead of me as I had so many thousands of times before, it dawned on me. The lovely, rolling road was not quite as lovely as it might be: there were black cables relentlessly following it up and over the first hill, then up the far-off crest of cemetery hill in the distance. I wasn’t really seeing the countryside as nature had made it, but as man had made it. Ich. I was curious, what must this scene have looked like just a hundred years ago before electricity made it this far out into the countryside? Hmm. We tend to think things have always been as they are right now. Even when we know that’s not true. It’s just that it’s so hard to visualize things radically different. It was a little daunting, but I tried to imagine it. A countryside without wires. Then a city without wires. A whole country? A whole planet? Not quite. I could hardly get the vision of my pastoral town wire-free in my mind’s eye. I did, however, manage to see it for a split second, and wow. Kinda mind-blowing. And also kinda mind-blowing that it should be mind-blowing. Now that I’ve seen it, these wires just look mangy to me. Nasty interruptions. Maybe we need ’em now, but I’m hoping not always.
Thankfully I’m dreaming again. I’m no scientist, no technician, and from my layman’s armchair I can see a list of problems with it – but might it be possible to transmit energy without all these wires? I’m guessing it’s a bigger question than I understand, but the point is, I’m giving that thought some of my own energy now. Imagine all those lines gone. Maybe where we are right now that seems plain crazy. But still, imagine it. And while we’re imagining that – how about imagining clean power? Free power. Power derived from latent energy that exists all around us. We can only harness what we can currently measure and detect. Imagine that there are forces we can’t yet detect, but that are there, waiting. Now imagine we can detect them, measure them, collect them, transmute the force’s form and create a power source. Ooh baby, call me nuts, but that’s where my late-night thoughts are taking me. It’s an exciting thought, even if it does sound impossible as things stand now. (In hopes of maintaining whatever credibility I’ve built up thus far in this forum, I’m gonna cite Misters Einstein and Stern right now as backup. This energy from nothing thing didn’t start with me. The zero point energy thing’s been around for a bit.)
So. That’s what I’m dreaming of today. Zero. Zero wires, zero emissions, zero. Wish I could get my visualization together enough to picture my body a size zero (or maybe just a one-zero. Yeah, I’d be happy with that). But that’s another dream altogether…
I’m so lame. It seems that I too commit the very transgressions that I so disdain in others. I’m a snob. How two-faced of me. To the end that I might explain myself, I offer these thoughts…
These past few years I’ve made a concerted effort to try living in a more humane and loving way. I try to see things from alternate perspectives when it comes to daily life events – events that otherwise I might interpret as offensive. I try to live with forgiveness and not take life too personally. I try to just let things be. While I have achieved some small success in these areas, somehow I find it incredibly difficult to apply the same level of forgiveness when it comes to the simple, grammatical mistakes people make. The omission of an ‘o’ when the writing requires a ‘too’ (as in also) rather than a ‘to’ (as in towards). I see ‘by’ instead of ‘buy’ and I think ‘Pfft. Can you imagine they missed that?’ And yet, the permanence of the blogosphere will never let me forget my own mistake; my misuse of the word ‘by’ at the top of yesterday’s post will forever remain thus in some far-off servers, unreachable by my post-post correction. Ultimately, it’s not that important. But it does teach me a little lesson. Humility, Elizabeth, humility. See? It’s very easy to make such a mistake yourself. You must overlook the small mistakes of others as you would have them do for you. Or must I?
There is one error that gets me absolutely riled up every time I see it. It’s when folks say that they’ve ‘graduated high school’. I can almost hear my seventh grade LA teacher Mrs. GaNun explaining to us in her rich, deep voice while striding slowly, dramatically across the room in her long skirts and topknot bun, that ‘you cannot graduate a high school because graduate is an intransitive verb…’ In other words, you can no more graduate a school than you can sleep a bed. You can sleep in a bed, you can graduate from a school. Yet the best-educated among us continue to tell us that they ‘graduated college’…
Another one that gets me is the improper use of personal pronouns. This one is everywhere. Simply everywhere. People who really should know better make these mistakes. I shudder, I bite my tounge. There was a time when I’d correct gently; ‘did me and Bob go to the store or did Bob and I go to the store?’ Just removed ‘Bob’ and say it again. Me went to the store or I went to the store? Duh! How easy is that? And btw – the ‘other guy’ goes first (I always think of it as simple manners) – ‘Bob and I went…’ It aint just the Latinas from the hood making this mistake either. All across the country ‘me and him went’ or ‘me and Bob took the car’….
And the offense that most easily gets under my skin – one I’ve even seen more than a few times in the past twenty four hours – is the addition of an ‘apostrophe s’ in order to make something plural. Yeeks. (Or should I say ‘yeek’s..?). I’ll not say anything more on this one. !
I’ve wrestled with this whole subject for years. On one hand, these are basic mistakes, and they should be corrected.The ones who made the errors should be educated, enlightened, corrected. Or should they? I am very aware that language evolves. Mr. Shakespeare’s English was practically another language altogether. And when’s the last time you heard a construction like this: ‘the laundry having been folded, she washed the dishes’..? Yet I remember well that first sentence of my junior high Latin class; ‘the Gauls having been conquered, they returned home’. Correct, but would you speak like this? Not so much.
There’s what was once correct, what is technically correct, and then there is plain old what works. What gets the point across. What expresses. Granted, we need to share some of the same rules in order to communicate effectively, but man, the liberties we’re able to get away with now really do add to the complexity and nuance with which we can communicate. ‘WTF?’ is just what you need sometimes, right? The limitation of characters we’re allowed to use has forced some new craft into writing, and I think that’s exciting. And sometimes a colon with a right parenthesis just does what no words can (and yes, its overuse can also spoil the effect). I get a kick out of the changes I’ve seen in our language in the past few decades. I think it’s amazing, beautiful, artful and organic. I also feel lucky to have been born now. In my lifetime I have witnessed probably the largest leap the English language has ever taken in such a short amount of time. I fully appreciate the freedom the new world provides – I misuse quotation marks all the time. I actually choose to do so because I feel it imparts a different tone. (I realize a real-life editor might well feel differently about this.) I make considered mistakes as a means to further shape my writing. Yeah, I dig the changes and maybe I just gotta get with the mistakes that are now becoming accepted parts of our language.
Then again, there’s that little voice that tells me there is still a set of rules which we should all honor. The rules that we all learned in school. You know, the schools we graduated from. Wait, we’re not supposed to end sentences with a preposition, right? Sigh…
I was too flabbergasted to edit my potty mouth before I’d shouted across the makeshift auditorium. I had just raised my hand, almost without thinking – it was more like a reaction, fired by the urgency of the moment and the pleading of my young son. We’d seen all the birds that were up for sale that night, and hadn’t seen anything much out of the ordinary. Elihu had been moping all night that he ‘wished we could have something more exotic’ than just chickens and guinea fowl. I’d been willing to go there, but aside from a cage of bedraggled-looking fantail pigeons, there just wasn’t anything else worth considering. But then out of nowhere, a rich, golden yellow emerged on the stage, and we both stared in disbelief. “Ten, now ten now ten now ten now ten” Oh-oh. A pheasant – crap, a friggin golden pheasant – like the kind we’d seen at the state fairs! Elihu can’t see things so well at a distance, and he doesn’t have the benefit of color to help him assess the scene; he thought he was seeing an alligator – at least he could tell it was something that had a very long tail. “Honey, that’s a golden pheasant. Go up and look”. He ran up to the stage to see for himself.
I began to do a lightening-quick assessment. Owning one wasn’t unheard of. We had a separate pen. We could. I guess. Yes, I guess we could. Geez, really? Elihu ran back and begged me to bid. “Twenty now twenty now twenty now twenty” the caller went on. ‘I can justify that’, I thought. ‘Twenty dollars, ok. We don’t eat out, I color my own hair…’ I raised my number. But then the price started going up fast. In seconds it was up to thirty dollars. I wasn’t so sure. I hesitated, card in my lap. Elihu was sitting beside me, dancing in his seat and getting frantic. He cried “Mommy, you gotta raise your hand high – like this” and he had raised his own small arm in the air, which in turn caught the attention of the dingy-looking men who stood in front of the auctioneer’s platform, scouring the crowd for bids. The auctioneer Moake himself, his hands-free headset digging into the soft, white flesh of his bald head pointed to me with a question on his face. Was I in? In that moment I grew even fonder of this place; if indeed I chose to pass on the creature up for bidding, I could, even if I had been the highest bidder. If I got cold feet, thankfully, here in this rural auction house I could simply shake my head ‘no’ and the next lowest bidder would walk with the prize. But when he pointed to me and ceased his auctioneer’s call, I nodded yes and held up the piece of yellow cardboard with my number on it. Moake recapped the sale across the p.a. system, “Item number 657 to 2764 for $32.50.” And that was that.
It’s been a while since Elihu and I have been to the Town and Country Auctions, in fact we hadn’t been yet this year, as I didn’t have a number on file in the system for 2011. (Once again, I have a current number on file. The folded piece of cardboard in my glovebox gives me the feeling that I’m not a poser and that I actually do belong here, buying livestock.) I can’t quite remember how I first learned of the place – maybe a bus driver at Elihu’s school, maybe someone at Tractor Supply offering an alternative source for live poultry. Anyway, discovering this micro-culture of domestic animal sales has propelled my son and me into our relatively new world of bird ownership.
Somehow, owning an animal, exotic or not-so exotic, just seems so much more doable when you’re at Moake’s auction house. Dozens of animals, from iguanas to miniature horses are lined up, side-by-side in cages, all of them there for the potential buyers to look over, to begin dreaming what it might be like to have such an animal in one’s own family… I’m never sure if folks there know what they’re doing, or if they’re on the quest for just the right critter to round out their menagerie. Will they be good, caring and responsible pet owners? Who the hell can tell? While it’s not always easy to spot folks’ motives, it does seem everyone there shares a certain outlook on life; all is possible, it’s not a big deal, and why not? I’ve seen folks carry off goats, shoving them into the holds of their CRVs… And I can’t help but wonder, do they really know what they’re getting into? Or does it matter? The beauty of this sort of animal purchase is that if you find it just ain’t working out, you can simply bring the creature back next Saturday and put it up for auction again.
And so, in this spirit of ‘Why not, what’s the worst that can happen?’, Elihu and I have embarked on a few bird-owning adventures. We learned about homing pigeons through our purchase of a robust flock, including personal favorites Lily and King Louis, members of our household for over a year, until a raccoon dined on Lily. Shortly after that, one fine October day as I called Louis to join us overhead for a brisk walk in the field, he was intercepted by a hawk and carried off through the forest to his death. Oh well. It was a good run, and we learned a lot. Enough to embolden us to then buy Magpie pigeons, and have Elihu join the National Pigeon Association and become the nation’s youngest member.
And the chickens. We learned about breeds. About Banties – short for Bantams – which are just genetically engineered, smaller versions of the standard size breeds. We’ve had the chance to see all manner of farmyard fowl up close; geese, turkeys, peafowl, guinea fowl, quail, ducks, chickens of all shapes and sizes. It’s a great place to learn, that’s for sure. And it gives the commoner an opportunity to dabble. That’s how we started, as tentative dabblers, gleaning whatever bits of knowledge we could from the folks who seemed to know what they were doing. The folks who could grab a 35-pound turkey and fight back the thundering wings to manhandle it into submission, and into a box. Those are the folks we ask questions of. The wisdom we’ve acquired! It’s always an adventure.
And so the adventure continues in the form of Timothy, our new Red Golden Pheasant. I’m glad to have had a teensy bit of experience with these birds. (Last summer we visited the NY State Pheasant re-population program in Ithaca, a stunningly huge operation where thousands of pheasants live under 6 acres of netting. We were allowed to roam through these vast, tented flocks – and I still have a scar from a scratch given to me by a powerful male.), Thanks to our visit with those animals, I wasn’t altogether surprised when I had my first taste of this guy’s power. They are muscley birds. They pack a punch. They’re fast, flighty and strong. Birds on the whole are stronger than you’d think – something you learn straight away when you have occasion to hold them as they struggle. Since his explosion from crate to pen we haven’t had occasion to touch Timothy again. And we will not touch him unless we have to. Now, the task ahead is to gain his trust. I have my doubts about this actually coming to fruition, as all game birds just seem so much flightier; they’re wilder than their barnyard cousins. However, our requisite Google mini-course has assured us that this breed ‘tames easily’ and can be gentle and docile. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Elihu has before him a personal quest, a mission that will test his self-discipline. He cannot rush in with this new bird if he is to reach a point one day where he can actually hold this bird on his arm, or pat its gorgeous feathers. He kinda blew it with a parrot we once had, moving too fast, too soon, eliciting bites and other bad behavior from the now-nervous bird. He wasn’t able to give our keets – baby guinea fowl – the slow, steady trust-building time needed to approach them without them fleeing. On the story goes. So now he is eight, and he is getting things, you know? He is beside himself with the new member of our family, and I pray this time the magic holds and that he can find it motivation enough to move gentle and slow. Just this morning – a school day – he was up extra early, dressed and on his way outside to the pen to spend some quiet time with Timothy. (Btw – one of the first names on the list was Buckingham, something his regal plumage supports quite well. I’m still not quite on board with Timothy. But Elihu feels it’s a gentle name, and he is a bird of gentle heart. We shall see…) To his credit, Elihu has already logged several hours in the pen with this fabulous bird in which he’s done nothing but sit and convey his feelings to the bird in song, low, soothing tones of conversation and hopeful transmissions of gentle and meditative thought. A good start.
A quick call to my mother from the auction brought me to my senses; we’d originally come for more laying hens, as our layers have been plucked off one by one over the past few months by the local wildlife, leaving Eggs of Hope unable to deliver on standing orders (let alone supply Elihu his daily ration). I saw a nice trio of laying hens – hardy and handsome Rhode Island reds – and easily bought them for another ten bucks. Money well spent. We put them in the coop when we returned home around midnight on Saturday, leaving our better inspection of them for the daylight hours. Daylight and a closer look at them showed one of our ‘layers’ to be an adolescent male. Argh. And he’s handsome, too. Oh man, I don’t need another over-sexed rooster! I need eggs! Crap. Now Elihu has named him (Einstein…?!) and soon he’ll be a member of our family too and we won’t be able to part with him. We’d have him butchered, but at $4 for the service and a 40-mile drive there and back it just doesn’t make sense. And we’d leave him out overnight for the fox that lives here, but something just won’t let us.
There is the option of selling him back again. That, and another option that serendipitously dropped in our path: it just so happens that there are only two big bird swaps in this area a year – one in March and one in October – and the next one is next Sunday! We’re advised to get there early – by 8 – if we’re to find a lady for our Red Golden Pheasant. And don’t overpay – like we did at the auction – we should only pay about $10 a head for a hen and not much more. And maybe get him two gals – that’s about right for his breed. How lucky are we? So next Sunday, I think Einstein might be coming with us to the big bird tailgate party and finding himself a new home, and hopefully we’ll be bringing home some hens for Timothy.
On it goes. New birds, new situations, new challenges. Soon comes winter, and by then I must have my new coop insulated, and must outfit Timothy’s pen with a heat lamp. Deep down I’m kinda excited, even mildly thrilled, for who knew that Elihu and I would be the owners of an exotic game bird? I consider briefly the life we might be living had we stayed in Illinois. No matter where we lived, above our Cafe in Dekalb, in an apartment in Rogers Park or Evanston, we could never, ever have had the wonderful experiences that we’ve had here if we’d lived in those places. And in those moments when I wonder at what we left behind, and what might have been (and in the moments when I miss the lake so) I just remind myself how lucky we are to have had all of these wonderful, unpredictable experiences.
I am grateful to the newest member of our family, Timothy, our beautiful Red Golden Pheasant, for ushering in a new chapter of the ongoing adventure….
I begin to awake. I am aware my dream was just that, but I try to remain there, my waking conscious mind trying to reel the scenario back, to elaborate on it, to discover what might had happened had sleep continued… Oh, oh, oh, here I am again, when I was just there… I can hear the rooster through my foam-stuffed ear. I open my eyes and peer out over my tiny, disheveled house – when just moments ago there was possibility, allure, potential…
I’d designed a beautiful reunion event, and while no one had showed thus far, the room looked good. Ready. A few folks came to investigate, and they complemented me on my success. Satisfied, I left to go peruse the other peoples’ parties – for this is what it was, a day of many events, one atop the other in multi-leveled rooms, down large hallways, on top of dramatic cantilevered staircases, spread across large shallow pools with floating cups of light… And I simply wandered in and out of them, faintly hoping to meet someone I knew, meeting only distant acquaintances of acquaintances… Once again I was thin, once again I was young, once again my dress was elegant, once again this was simply the way I existed in the world…
I recall another chapter from my night. There was a man from my dream named Steven, with whom my friendship promised warmly and in good humor to develop into something more intimate, now that he had bought the new townhome… I picture the home in my head, the street view, the neighborhood (for my dreams are usually more about place and the feeling of place than anything else) and I wonder if it really would have been better to live out my life there. Things would not have lingered in that buzzing, hopeful mood forever, would they have? Laundry, at some point, along with a myriad of other toilsome things would eventually need to be done. Right? Or not? Oh, to live in that suspended state of promise…
I simply cannot draw the dreams out any further. I muse on the few familiar faces I did see, and try to recall their names, and from where I know them in my waking life. Kathy from camp. We loved each other, we were the outsiders. What was her name? She was there in my dream – yet I wasn’t able to reach her, too many bodies in between. Then a mousey, dancer girl I knew in High School – how on earth did she get there? And the chubby black guy holding an infant like a football – what was that about? There will be no answers, just perhaps a frantic search in the damp basement for the box that contains my senior class yearbook so that I might find that dancer girl… Maybe a meditative moment of concentration to bring back Kathy’s last name followed by a search on Facebook… The dream is done. The day can no longer be avoided. I remain quiet. My son is still sleeping, my world is still private. I’m left with a slight residue of sorrowful back-looking and what-ifs coloring my first waking moments.
The rooster has been quarantined in the garage. Last night was his first apart from his flock, and I can no longer lay in bed, coaxing enlightenment from the vapors of my dreams as his discomfort is descending on my conscience… I get up, shuffle to the mudroom and don my flopping, unzipped winter boots, to make the wet trek to the coop. I open up the interior door to the run, then attend to the de-throned king in his tiny apartment. He is perched, his dignity maintained surprisingly well, atop an old metal shelf cast on its side for just this purpose. Poor guy. I open the outside door and he pushes past me. He has never been apart from his ladies like this. Does this bother him? (As much as a chicken can be bothered.) He paces back and forth along the fence of his private enclosure, strutting and scratching at the dirt, indicating he ‘means business’. The hens’ backs are missing feathers and raw on the shoulders due to the non-stop sex life of this rooster. Finally, the poor girls have a break. You’re welcome.
Yesterday we’d entertained a four year old boy for the day and had pulled out Elihu’s old tricycle for him to ride around. I trudged over to remove it from the middle of the driveway. It is blue and shiny. Elihu had always called it ‘Mongey’ – with a hard g – because the name of the bike was ‘Mongoose’. We took Mongey with us a lot of places. Like when Fareed would have a long rehearsal, or we’d be visiting a childless household with time to kill. In the rainy day gray of the morning I stare down at the little blue tricycle, my wakefulness tinged with the sense of longing that the dreams have left behind.
I picture the year when Elihu was four, when he himself decorated his little tricycle with a glass ball ornament on each handlebar. Colorblind, he couldn’t have known it, and perhaps I had had a hand in it, I don’t remember, but he ended up with one red, one green. An image flashes in my mind: a tiny boy with hair gently curling at his neck, pedaling madly, his knees flying up towards his ears, the glass ball ornaments dangling… He is riding away down the long hall of the practice rooms at Northwestern University. It is also gray outside. The light is even, neither light nor dark. I can’t tell if it’s day or evening. I feel suspended in time and space. Fareed had just told me of his pregnant girlfriend a few days before. I am sick. I am trying to understand how to live, how to exist, to react, behave. How to breathe. I am stunned, I am looking at our son, the comical image of his mad pedaling, and realizing that I cannot share this moment with my husband as my heart yearns to; with our arms around each other as we look on in love at the child we have created together.
I need not lament this sad moment in my past story, for this morning is filled with my son’s declarations of his love for me. Is this not truly the pinnacle of a mother’s existence? He is happily cleaning up after our young visitor yesterday, at my coaching putting ‘like with like’, sorting airplanes from cars, dinosaurs from gum wrappers, singing all the while, telling me how happy he is and how much he loves me, and I am here, in the beginnings of a good mood, purging myself of the morning’s emotional residue in the form of a new post.
Half-remembered dreams leave me with longing. And while longing can be good fodder for creation and progress, longing can also be a disheartening feeling to live with. These past few years I’ve had to deal with many bouts of longing head-on. And for me, the best cure for that frustratingly diffuse ‘what-if’ game starts with a tidy house. There are those (my ex included) for whom this might seem a distraction in of itself – a condition that I’ve mandated for myself that obscures the work or challenge at hand. Perhaps. If so, so be it. For me, an orderly house brings a great sense of control, of peace. I’m not naive enough to think I actually do have control, but I’m human enough to still want the illusion.
And so right now I will turn to the tidying of my home. The aligning of things on shelves, the straightening of piles, the putting away of things with like things, these are the actions I can take today that will bring me a sense of certitude, of conclusion. At the very least, I can know where I stand in relationship to the artifacts I share my life with. My waking to-do list may never dwindle, and I may never again see my old friend Kathy but for my dreams, but I know that I love my son, I know he loves me, and I know that everything in my home will soon be neatly tucked away in its place for now.
Tonight, as we stood in line at the brightly lit local convenient store, Elihu asked me if it was ‘technically still summer’. I guess I’d been thinking this recent coldish air was just a passing thing; somewhere on board I still had last-minute summer-ish plans for us. There must be another spell of heat coming again…right? His question had me take immediate stock; just what was the date today? The 19th? ‘I guess fall officially starts tomorrow’ I answered. No one corrected me. Later, at home, when I googled for accuracy, I learned that it actually starts on the 23rd – a number that puzzles me as I don’t ever remember anything but the 20th heralding a new season. (Just me? Who knows. Like my son, I feel like I miss half of what every other earth citizen seems to have an inbred knowledge of.) Aah well. No matter, in a few days it will indeed be fall.
The morning temps in our small house are dipping into the 50s now, and I find myself wondering when exactly do ‘most’ folks turn on their furnaces? Until this present country life all I knew was that I adjusted the thermostat and the house became more comfortable. Now, knowing that the oil in our tank is an emergency delivery from the state delivered last spring, and one which will not allow us another fill-up for months, I am not close to engaging the furnace. Rather, we use the small electric heaters to take the edge off of certain spots in the early morning; Elihu’s bedroom (mine dips down to the mid 50s – but I’m back to long underwear so it’s bearable) then the kitchen, if we eat there at all. Sometimes it’s just easier to eat in his bedroom, huddled around the heater at his little desk. Not so bleak as it sounds – it’s actually kinda cozy. I’m apprehensive however as to how it will look on our bill. It’s been awhile since we’ve used these little juice suckers.
Elihu played his first ever game of soccer today – his first ever day of a shared sport of any kind except for at gym (this warrants an entire post of its own) and I felt the chill closing in as soon as the sun sank below the tree line. All the other kids were wearing only T shirts, but my kid, I’d put him in three layers in anticipation of just such a drop in temperature. At first I’d felt guilty as so many kids had sweat-plastered hair on their brows, but by the end of the game I felt better about my choice. He too felt the cold and was glad for the extra layers.
When I step outside I can now smell the scent of firewood in the air – a sure sign my neighbors have begun the long winter’s burn of those carefully stacked cords of wood. The blue plastic tarps have been peeled back, the plywood lean-tos no longer filled quite to the top… Summer has a few days left, yet already the burn has begun.
It’s been a week. I got a cold. Got myself an IUD, got a temporary crown on a broken molar. The crown broke off after I got home, so a few days later I got another one put on. Got my materials for my fall piano class together and met my son’s third grade teacher. Been woken up by the crazy pain of this silly tooth nearly every night now and the cold lingers, juicy. Elihu spills into the car after school yesterday all in tears over the chaotic, energetic maelstrom that is the first week of school. He can hardly understand all the procedures, all the rules, the subtleties of it all. I understand. I don’t try to fix it, I just get in the back seat with him and let him cry, his head in my lap. His tummy’s been off too. Today’s income is gone as my student calls this morning to cancel; she’s heard I’ve been sick. Oh, and I stepped on my glasses and Elihu lost a tooth. It’s been a week.
Today the sun is shining, the air is crisp and I have come home from the store with a gallon of semi-transparent stain in barn red. After hoping to give the new chicken coop a demure coat of dark gray, in hopes of achieving the look of elegantly weathered cedar, I have finally given in to my color blind son’s request that we please paint it barn red instead.
Tomorrow is Saturday, and the weather promises to be just fine for painting.
The Hillhouse 