Friends brought a lemon meringue pie to dinner at our house. We don’t really eat much sugar, but birds love it. So we put the pie out for the geese the next morning.
It sat there for 24 hours. Hot day. It did not attract ants. The cats looked at it. The geese avoided it entirely. Eventually they examined it, then walked in it, then ate the crust.
Guess lemon meringue isn’t strictly food.
We’ll be having a strange adventure in Las Vegas this weekend. Back next week.
We are going on a mini-vacation this weekend — I seem to be getting us involved in time off with only the tiniest of reasons. I wish I could go back to graduate school. Not really, I hated graduate school. I just wish — and this does not mean I dislike what I do — that I could branch out. I feel restless. Work is repetitive. Work is repetitive.
I’m starting to plan and market some training seminars. That could help. I could write articles for my professional journals. That could help. I could grow a beard, join a religious order, go to clown school, have an affair, learn a new language, write a book (bwaa-ha-ha), become a spy, learn about real estate or investment banking, or pressure a relative into funding my escape from reality. I could take up photography, figure drawing, body building, wedding cake decoration, arc welding, raising corgies, origami, landscape design, be a farmer, a psychic, a bread-maker, a milliner, a life coach, a consultant, a fly on someone’s wall, a generous anonymous donor, a superhero, a martyr, a flyfisher, a wine-maker.
I could start listening in on other people’s conversations, I could interrupt anyone who tries to talk to me, I could look up old friends on the internet and be amazed by how much they’ve aged, I could go visit my grandfather’s ashes, I could take a road trip. Oh wait. That’s what I’m going to do. Take a road trip. Well…
I could paint the dining room, repair the fences, build a new chicken coop, hire a yard man. I could grow wings and hover in the air above my house then fly to France like I used to when I was a little girl. Over and over again, dreaming of flying to France. I could dream of flying to France and then pop in over in Italy or Spain or Ireland, maybe Morocco or Mali or Maine. I could sleep better so dreams would come more easily, I could go to law school and save the world, I could be a carefree dreamer with a trust fund from a mysterious and pleasant source and hardly any neuroses about it at all.
I could.
He’s ready to go. Empanaditas for the holidays. He’s got
canela in one eye, comino in the other, and red chile
wherever it needs to be.
I know, he’s early, but he’s hot, que no?
Where I live. Pretty. The leaves are about to change. The guinea hen is relaxed and quiet under the mulberry tree. The cat is showing me her belly on the warm porch. The apples are weighing down the branches on a young tree. There’s a red vase of sunflowers sitting near the window. There’s not a sound nearby, other than an occasional chip from the sleepy lovebirds.
I commented on a CNN political site in response to some jerk probably perfectly nice bigot “patriot” fellow American who blames all our problems on Mexicans coming across the border.
A relatively mild-mannered comment, to the effect that part of the influx is related to economic stress in Mexico brought on by NAFTA.
Immediately got attacked by another gentleman fellow, who slammed my NAME (soy Teresa, ese, not “Terry” - in quotes!), who said I was a socialist and a loser, like Vicente Fox, and blamed everything on Clinton. Which, of course, NAFTA was a Clinton accommodationist decision that I wasn’t crazy about either. But holy cow, isn’t there some kind of deprogramming we can do to wash the koolaid out of these mad people?
Made me cringe. I rarely indulge in online political discussion (married to a Kos-ack, however). But my nephew (come back, come back), who looks like any guy they’d pitch across the border if he didn’t have his papers with him, has recently found the Lord and apparently Jesus has been saying it’s all about the wetbacks too. Oh, and Clinton. Man, Jesus has changed a lot.
Guess we’re warming up for another great divide.
Viva la difference. Ese.
Had this dream a few days ago:
I’m hanging out on the beach with a bunch of friends. They are all super buff, tanned, hearty beach types. We’re having a great time. One of them tells me a story about the ghost sailboats that haunt this shore. Swimmers see them and are compelled to go after them, climb aboard. They swim too far, are carried out to sea, and drown.
My friends leave and I am sitting watching the waves as the sun goes down. Suddenly, I see them — the ghost boats, dozens of them, glowing, translucent, rolling with the waves. I get in the water and swim swim til I reach one and climb in. Turning around to look back at the beach, I see I’ve come much too far, and it is almost dark. I can tell, from this distance, that once it is dark I won’t be able to find the shore again. Far out on the horizon is a last moment of sun, narrowing into a shrinking triangle in the distance. I abandon the boat and swim toward it as it fades, and pull myself onto the sand, which is still warm.
I get up, brush myself off, and go to find my friends. They are inside, working out, cooking, listening to music, dancing. I go to the gym looking for one person in particular, a young black man. I want to talk to him about my swim, about almost drowning. When I get there, he has been handcuffed, and he’s being taken away by scary authoritarian goons. We are all arguing, crying, why are they taking him? Where are they taking him? Let him go, now, we say.
Then I woke up.
It’s a regular part of my life to work with families who have just learned that their child has autism. Sometimes they are given this diagnosis gently, sometimes not.
Used to be an uncommon diagnosis. Not any more. Used to be people didn’t know anyone with autism. Not any more.
When I was 19 or so, I was floundering around making uninformed decisions, trying to figure out how to live my life without a plan. I worked for awhile with a family as an au pair (completely untrained). They had four children and another on the way. I have no idea how I got that job.
Their 10-year-old had autism. He said “lugadabugadoo lugadabugadoo” repeatedly. He rocked on his heels. He knew the names of every radio staion in the Los Angeles area. He liked to run water over his hands in the bathroom while reciting the names of the radio stations.
He and I were pretty good friends. He followed me everywhere; I taught him how to jump rope. Not very well, but still, I felt that we had made a happy and mutual connection.
That was a long time ago, and since then his family will have made decisions about his life as an adult. He was not a kid who was likely to grow up and live independently, but he was fortunate to have a family with the resources and the emotional stability to work hard on his behalf.
Used to be, people didn’t have a picture of what autism can look like. Now they do. They’ve seen the specials on TV, they’ve looked at the websites. They’ve got neighbors and cousins. And the possibility that their child with autism might be rocking, head banging and utterly dependent on them for life is understandably frightening. And is one possibility.
When I had cancer as a kid, my parents were told that I would probably die, and that was probably for the best, because if I lived I would be brain damaged from radiation and hideously disfigured. Which made me, for some time, the official family tragedy.
So unnecessary, so wrong. But while experts don’t want to hand out false hope to young famlies, we can unintentionally be damned generous in handing out despair.
When I hear from my families that their kid just got a life sentence of autism, I know the news was delivered by the fact doctor and not from the heart. Makes me want to smack my colleagues in the head, remind them not to be automatic, not to crank out that diagnosis like we’re working in a fast-food line.
I will probably not use this blog to talk much about my profession. But there is this overlap for me and my personal history, as I try to guide these moms and dads back to their own child, the one whose future has not been nailed down by a stranger with a simple, reductionary label.
As the snow began to fall, last Christmas:
Laurie and I have six geese, 4 different varieties:
What I know about geese
They are insomniac. Paranoid. Community oriented. Loyal. Poor problem solving. Talkative. Good listeners. Predictable. Protective. Demanding. Vulnerable. Big bags of feathers and noise.
Habits and talents
Daily bathing. Standing on one foot, all together, staring out the gate at passing traffic. Hissing when deeply frightened. Slipping through any barely open gate. Creeping up silently on unsuspecting bottoms. Master goosers.
The language of geese is very tonal. Dissonant when dissonance is called for, soft and melodic when all is calm.
Characteristics of my very tame geese
They follow directions –
They comment, request and demand:
I can’t seem to say what it is. The placid group wandering, the bright eyes, the running commentary. They let me stroke their breasts (when the mood strikes them). I periodically have to save them from some foolish danger — heads stuck in gates, trapped in the cane field, rushing to attack some unsuspecting visitor. Wherever I am on my wee little farm, there are six geese close by, telling me what they see and how they feel. I am in and of this flock.
The intent to marry must be posted in a public place for 20 days before the intended event. The marriage itself should take place in public, either at the courthouse or in some other appropriately solemn setting.
On the occasion of civil marriage, according to Justice Quebec:
Marriage is governed by the Civil Code of Québec, which concerns family law. It is founded on two key principles: equality between the spouses, and free choice of a matrimonial regime. The spouses must
- choose the family residence together;
- contribute toward household expenses according to their respective means;
- jointly assume the debts contracted for the day-to-day needs of the family; and
- comply with the legal provisions governing partition of the family.
From the ceremony itself, this is what the magistrate said (paraphrased):
You are responsible for taking care of each other, your home and your family. You will contribute equally to that care. Equally may refer to monetary contribution, but may also refer to any balance of work and care agreed upon between you. You are responsible for living together in a shared household. If you cannot afford an independent living situation, you should still live together with extended family as defined by you.
What a nice country. What a beautiful thing, to base marriage on the assumption of equality. Wow, I got this feeling we were not in Kansas anymore.
Our hotel staff left this in our room while we were being ridden to the courthouse in procession in our flower-festooned bicycle rickshaws (more later!), and well, that was one more sweet moment in a remarkable day.
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