25 August 04
What’s Goth?
One of the more interesting (used here as a synonym for frustrating) things about my burgeoning logocentric connection with my mother is her awareness that she lost twenty-five years of American popular culture and language by living in Spain and came back to find that her mother tongue was no longer, well, current. And she assumes mine is. (Even though I lost almost the same amount of time and didn’t even grow up here!)
So, for instance, on Sunday when we had lunch on a figged patio in Sonoma, she asked what “goth” was.
The answer to this question is different now than it would have been ten years ago. I flounder. Do I describe the former or the latter? I try and explain as best I can, but she’s never even really seen one (I decide we should start with the noun goth rather than the adjective). So I’m reduced to selecting body parts like some demented early Renaissance poet, when it would be so much easier just to point one out in the street. They are thin on the ground in Sonoma, though, upscale chichi pseudo-Tuscan hamlet that it is. Goths, even their latest watered-down suburban incarnation, tend to be “urban.” Dressedinblack. Edgy. Or edgy-wannabes. (I gave up trying to explain what edgy was a couple of years ago.)
She tries so, so hard to find all this out on her own, surrounding herself with reference books and, when she gets really daring, online resources. There’s just one problem: all the definitions use words that themselves need defining in relation to the culture. She feels at sea in the country whose passport she carries, an immigrant from a past where words meant what you thought they meant. I’m sympathetic but ultimately can’t really help her; she tends to listen hard and then decide this, too, will elude her.
It was much easier when she asked me later on to remember specific sweeties from my grandmother’s sweetshop in Lancashire from the early sixties for a story she was working on. That was easy: Smarties. Sherbet fountains. Jelly babies. Dolly Mixtures. Gobstoppers. Liquorice Allsorts. Toffee. The smell of that wood-panelled paradise came flooding back, mint mixed with tobacco mixed with citrus sugar, along with assorted memories of inedible things in the boarding house where we were staying, such as blancmange in the shape of a bunnyrabbit (poor bunny, said my four-year-old Californian self, refusing dessert). Memories of double-decker buses filled with the warm fug of cheap cigarette smoke and wet umbrellas, everyone going somewhere in the rain that never stopped. Memories of grandma in her hospital bed, breathing, breathing…
24 August 04
Psst!
This is one of many hundreds of words in the Dictionary of All-Consonant Words, part of several such collections at the Strange & Unusual Dictionaries home. After all, you never know when you’ll run out of vowels.
(From LibrarianinBlack)
23 August 04
Precept
Forty-five years ago today, I was born not too far from here.
My mother and I have grown closer over the years; the connection has been writing. I send her a poem, she sends me one, kind of thing.
This is the one she sent me for today:
Precept
Even then,
our little girl
saw beauty
in a snail on the move
whose disguise
lies in doing things
slowly.
She painted one,
not in camouflage
but strident walnut taupe,
for its journey up
a sturdy turquoise blade
that dared to stab awake
the lasting
blue.
Her work hangs,
now in a wood frame,
part of this empty house,
and I’m seventy.
22 August 04
Leaps And Bounds
Diego is by a good bit the most agile of our two kitties. He’s always leaping up on things, mostly just to check out what’s happening. (Charlie is getting better at his leaps but often it seems has to pull himself up by his forepaws.) Yesterday evening he gave a prime example of this. One of his favorite spots to sit is the trunk bag that sits on top of the rear rack of our tandem. This itself is about a yard off the ground. Anyway, I was changing the 5-gallon water bottle on our water dispenser—glug, glug, glug it was going, filling the empty dispenser. Diego leaps in one bound from the tandem rack to our couch, then without missing a beat, leaps in a second bound from the couch on to the countertop, and then steps over to the water bottle to check out the commotion. He’s a regular scientist, our Diego.
21 August 04
Another Sketching Jaunt
Today Numenius and I took a trip to a zoo we hadn’t visited before: the one in Folsom. This was a refreshing change from previous zoos we’d been to; the focus is entirely on providing a safe home for mostly California-native animals that would either not have made it in the wild or would have had to have been destroyed. There are several camp-marauding bears, injured raptors, foxes, wolves, wolf/dog hybrids, tigers rescued from an illegal breeder (who apparently had 60 large cats in an area maybe three of them could have lived in comfortably), bunnies and chickens rescued from overzealous Easter gift-bearing relatives, ferrets, and so on. Peacocks, including an interesting male albino, supervised all day. The reason we went, though, is so I could do some studies of mountain lions.
I wish I had access to an inexhaustible warehouse of high-quality photographs of wildlife I could use whenever I needed an image for a project at work. We have a couple of good shots here and there, but you don’t want to overuse these. Plus, I could never get a photo of what it is I want—a mother looking out, two cubs playing—in the order and so on. I’ll have to do it myself.
My illustration teacher used to tell us to be sure to get a variety of pictorial references before starting a project. Photos should be a last resort. Live was always best, she said; video’s pretty good (funky pause buttons make an animal almost seem to be in motion); taxidermy and skeletons have their uses. But live is certainly best (and most challenging). Although the Folsom Zoo currently has no mountain lion cubs, I was able to see things in these animals I’d never noticed before. Our kittens are structurally similar but there are important differences; the mountain lion, though small for a large cat, is massive and moves heavily (though a couple of pounces showed us how little chance you’d have to get away if one decided you were somehow superfluous).
Above is a group of sketches I reworked when we got home this afternoon, a combination of watercolor pencil and watercolor.
20 August 04
Bears Prefer Microbrews
From Richard Hall comes a story giving evidence towards the general superiority of microbrews over mass-market beer.
Kitten update: We took Carlos and Blake, the two feral kittens we caught yesterday, to the vet today where they were neutered and both tested negative for FeLV. A co-worker of Pica’s is graciously fostering them temporarily over the weekend.
19 August 04
All We Do Now Is Wait
I’ve set the trap to try and catch the two new kittens while Numenius is out at Spanish. I ran to buy smelly cheap catfood and a robust carrier. This evening I spotted their mother, a bright orange tabby. I’m hoping we catch her; the kittens will stay near her (though they are now coming up to the back door and exchanging hisses with Diego and Charlie) and should be easy enough to catch.
I’m guessing, having seen them this closely, they’re about two months old. Tamable. What a relief.
Numenius already has names for them: Carlos and Blake. I’m assuming the orange tiger’s what inspired the latter…
Postcript, 10:10 pm: both kittens are caught and in a carrier in the carport. We found a new use for the Honda Element, aka Nellie: use as a place to transfer kittens from a trap to a carrier without fear of their escaping when your bathroom’s no longer an option.
18 August 04
Back To Class
My second semester of Spanish started yesterday. Again, this is through the local city college. Thankfully we’re using the same exact text so I don’t have to spend lots of money on new books. It’s a long class period—I think fifteen weeks, running the middle of August through the middle of December. We meet twice a week, in a slightly more inconvenient location (south Davis rather than on the UC Davis campus) than last time. I didn’t make good on my intention to study lots of Spanish over the summer, but at least we’re starting out with a review of last semester’s work.
17 August 04
Da Capo
Where I sit, now, is pretty much where I always sit when I set out to write a blog entry. It’s at a 12” iBook on a white tile counter (cluttered with papers) that separates the kitchen from the living room, and it faces the kitchen window. Through this window I can see an English walnut tree, in full leaf with the fruits coming in, and a wall of corn. The cornfield is now about 11 feet tall. This is the first year they’ve planted corn in this field; before now it’s all been tomatoes, squashes, maybe sorghum that reached a maximum height of about four feet.
I’ve never lived in a jungle but I’m starting to get a sense of green impenetrability, and I don’t relish it all that much. I didn’t before Sunday.
Then, on Sunday:
A light fawn kitten emerged from the cornfield.
There’s only one word for this, really: shit.
Last night we watched as this kitten AND a more orange sibling emerged to eat the food we left out for what we thought was ONE kitten, which we thought we had a chance to catch. We’ve even bought a humane trap to do this. With two, it’s a lot harder.
What do we do? We have one bathroom which, when it’s not being used as a kitten nursery, we tend to use. We have two kittens, now permanently indoors, that have been de-wormed, tested for FHIV and feline leukemia, neutered, treated for intestinal parasites, vaccinated, and are healthy; these two new kittens are so much like them in every way but size I can’t help but think they’re siblings who got left out of our grand roundup back in May and are stunted from a lot less to eat. But for sure they have worms, coccidia, respiratory stuff, the works, most of it contagious and all of it unpleasant. And they’re not sterilised—my biggest priority. We cannot stretch this household further. Quite apart from the fact that if they really are four months old, they’re almost certainly too old to be tamed.
I wish I had the meditation gene.
I guess this feels like enough of a rerun to qualify for the Ecotone Wiki’s RePlace.
16 August 04
Bear Story
One final story from our camping trip. The last two nights we spent on the west side of the Sierra crest. When we arrived at Devils Postpile the first of these nights, we saw that there were hefty bear lockers at each campsite, with elaborate latches you had to stick your hand in to open. Large instructions said to place all food within the locker, the definition of food being expanded to include “anything with a scent” (toiletries, first aid kits, etc. all qualified). The zealous park ranger came around to every camper and repeated the instructions. He explained that the bears had been visiting the Minaret Falls campground (run by the Forest Service) a couple of miles up the canyon, including breaking into one car, but so far there had been no problem at Devils Postpile. We took the instructions seriously, and even took advantage of the substantial size of the bear locker to stow much of our gear in there and try the successful experiment of sleeping in our car.
The next day we headed through Yosemite going over Tioga Pass, and avoided the crowds of the park to camp at a Forest Service campground a few miles outside of the west entrance to Yosemite. Again there were bear lockers, but flimsier and older ones. And the camp host said that bears had been visiting the campground every night. We try not to stress too much about this, but as we were in our tent that evening, the clanking of people emptying their trash into the dumpsters got replaced by impassioned banging about of the dumpsters, including the one about 15 meters from our tent. Shouts and lights, and then the noise moves off. We try to doze some, but maybe an hour later there is even more desperate banging nearby, not to mention audible huffing, as we stayed petrified in our tent. The bear or several (somebody was saying it was a mother and a couple of cubs) didn’t come closer, and gave up trying to undo the latch on the dumpster. We finally got to sleep, and were quite glad to see morning come.
It’s been a tough year for the bears—it’s been quite dry, and it’s been hard for them to find food.