When daylight breaks, bring in the paper and over breakfast, plan a caper. Crazy plans are fun to bake up. Do your nails, put on some makeup. Call in sick. Forsake your labors and boggle all your friends and neighbors by doing something crazy wild. Reconnect your inner child.
A vital element in fun is do not stop until you’re done. Paint your house a vivid hue. Then why stop there. Why not paint you? Go for a boat ride, buy a bike. Buy hiking boots and take a hike.
Wear funny clothes. Get a tattoo. No end to things that you could do.
Turn your hems up, cut your hair. (No one can see what’s under there.) Take Santa Claus out on a date. Most months he’s bored. Don’t hesitate! When you are letting loose, please just only do the things you must. It’s vital that at least just once you dare to play the fool or dunce
and take the chance to try to binge and do what makes the whole world cringe. It’s fun sometimes to be unique in what we do or how we speak— to be that person standing out with anything that you can flout. Life’s too short to always do what the world expects of you!!!
Image by Pierrick Van Troost on Unsplash. Used by permission
Fitting In
He held his campaign kick-off in a colossal yurt, clad in plaid Bermuda shorts and a rubber shirt. His children were unruly, but his wife was slim and perky. She dispensed campaign buttons that were colorful and quirky. On them he wore colossal shoes, big pants and a red nose, but she explained the reason for his eccentric clothes. Why he wore the clownish clothes and the painted face was to even out the odds for the senate race. He wanted to fit in, he said, with others in the Senate and look like all the other clowns who were sadly in it. He won out by a landslide—an open and shut case— proving once again that any fool can win a race.
It’s true that she was lusty, outlandish and gregarious, with her behavior more or less branded as nefarious. Her dance in life was often described as arabesque, and when it came to marriages, her tale was Kafkaesque.
She mixed up her chronology, forgetting which came first.
Divorce or remarriage? She knew not which was worst: bigamy or loneliness. She simply couldn’t stand to be without a husband readily at hand. She often stood with tearful eyes before a judge’s desk—
seemingly an angel, albeit, picaresque.
Somehow when it came to love, right and wrong conflated.
True love made her dizzy. She wound up addlepated.
A comely wrinkling of her brows, a pout, a tear, a sigh and the judge forgave her. After all, he was a guy. A simple tiny slap upon her unrepentant wrist and a heartfelt promise that she would desist from practicing plural marriage was always the decree— guaranteeing her misdeeds in perpetuity. So went her personal history. It seems that she was fated to spend all her romantic life being inundated with husband after husband—one or two at a time— for courtships left her weak-kneed and weddings were sublime. Honeymoons her speciality, she found no fault with life until it came to living it as just one man’s wife!
Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash, used with permission
Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash, used with permission
The Butler and the Upstairs Maid
The butler and the upstairs maid once freed from bed and table resumed their hugs and kisses whenever they were able. He wooed her in the garden shed, the pantry and the granary. Not a place excluded from their extreme chicanery.
When traveling with her mistress, she could not help but fret. His passions unabated, he was always in a sweat. Within them both, the hormones were perpetually churning. How could they do their duties with these fires of romance burning?
At last, master and mistress called the vicar of the parish. What were they to do about this behavior most garish? They met this couple making love at every hallway’s turning. How were they to deal with these excesses of yearning?
The vicar in his wisdom knew the answer right away, so the problems of their dalliance was able to allay. Their passions once unquenchable were vanquished all too soon as soon as they were back again from their honeymoon.
Illustration by Isidro Xilonzóchitl, copyright Judy Dykstra-Brown, 2020
Doggies of the Realm
In seeking to coordinate the canines of the realm, they formed a grand committee with a countess at the helm to account for all the dachshunds and classify the terriers, find greyhounds in their kennels and yorkies in their carriers, to track down the grand pyrenees up in the highest rocks, to record all the lapdogs and dalmatians on their walks.
At first strict in her discipline in separating breeds, in protecting bloodlines and meeting owners’ needs, when her helpers warned her that they’d run out of spaces, she had to capitulate in order to find places. Since they’d run out of kennels, she had to loosen rules. She locked labs in the closets, tied boxers to the newels.
Put shih tzus in the cupboards and toy poodles in the drawers, stored retrievers in the boathouse, tied Chihuahuas to the oars. She felt she’d scored the jackpot when the prisoners all made bail and so they handed over the former county jail. She converted all the cellblocks into canine cages and began to fill up rosters—pages upon pages.
At first she sorted breeds using a system alphabetical, but later sorting systems became more hypothetical, and as her sorting powers eroded over time, soon she had her doggies classified by rhyme. For example, in the cages assigned to standard poodles, she filled the extra corners with the labradoodles.
She recorded canines of every breed and size— dogs with every length of hair, in every shape and guise, until at last she had them all down in black and white— every wagging tail and every growl and bite. So the snappers and the lickers, the yappers and the yippers got to go back home to retrieve their masters’ slippers!!
Can your wardrobe accommodate clothes tight and loose? Yellow and purple and pink and chartreuse? What say you of maroon and mustard and puce? Have you anything velvet? Silk or charmeuse? Do you leap to acquire the newest of fashions? Are ripped jeans and bare midriffs your current passions? Are clothes an impulse, a way that you play? Do they fill up your dreams and round out your day? If so, then my wish for two thousand twenty is that you have closets and hangers aplenty. May you be fully satisfied trying on clothes, and be shrouded with fashion from shoulders to toes!!!
I don’t need to pay cover. I came with the band. See the bracelet I’m wearing? The stamp on my hand? I can come, I can go wherever I please. I’m the favorite of all—the lead singer’s main squeeze. Don’t gauge my importance by my appearance. I’m a V.I.P. I have backstage clearance! My jeans may be ripped, but I have tons of dough. I pay my own way wherever I go. The band extols my virtues. They know I’m no skag. I may look like a groupie, but I drive a jag!!!
She was disciplined and stern, rigid, staunch and taciturn. Her back seemed starched, her mouth a line. Her clothing smelled like turpentine. Each morning she dished out our gruel, then perch herself upon a stool expecting that we’d finish it. A spoonful left? She’d have a fit!
She’d stamp her foot in consternation and deliver an oration of how hard her life had been. Abandoned at the age of ten, working in a factory not pampered like the likes of me! And so I’d spoon the gruel up, or sneak it to my hungry pup,
leave the kitchen and escape to hall or street or fire escape. Every yule time was the same when my Aunt Winona came to visit us. “She’ll soon be gone,” my mother told us. “Just play along.” And so we did, all grateful for the day that she walked out the door!
(Click on mug shots to enlarge for better identification.)
She said: Wow!!!!
Side view of felon
For theft of birdseed, theft of catfood and molestation of Annie.
He said: Bow
For breaking house rules on noise pollution levels and frequency.
Side view of felon
Oh man. Brian pooped in the sala and peed in the spare bedroom, in spite of the fact that I took him out twice last night and once this morning. Then Annie cried all morning in spite of the fact I’d given her food, water and head scratches—perhaps because Brian was in my bed with me? Put Brian out, put a cushy bed for him out on the side of the house and opened gate for Morrie to join him in the side and front yard so they could play without Diego’s interference. Morrie immediately went for the cat food in this usual cat’s domain and then for Annie, whom I had forgotten was in the front garden. Chased her behind the big planter, where she was cowering when I came out to put Morrie back in the back yard and to rescue Annie. There are not enough zones in this house! I don’t know that I have a solution to the problem. Brian is crying outside but I won’t have an animal who pees and poops inside! Help.
1/2 hour later. Good news. Brian has stopped crying.
Mexico, 2002.Annie, my second kitten adopted in Mexico, in her favorite place. She was adopted a year or so after after Talulah, whom I had found in a basket of scarves in a shop in Tonala that she had streaked into a minute before I walked in. The owner, whose daughter was allergic, begged me to adopted her and guess what?
Annie as a kitten and almost 19 years later. Seems impossible. The second two photos are of the day the kittens arrived and I found Kukla on the wall in a standoff with Annie, whose meal they were eating! Fiesty little thing. (Photos will enlarge if you click on them.)
Dream’abort’ Annie
Two A.M. and four A.M., six A.M. and eight. My nineteen-year-old cat is such a reprobate. She awakens me with yowling to be fed again or simply for a rubbing over ears and under chin.
My night’s full of awakenings, my days are somewhat muddled. I try to block the sound of her. I’m bleary and befuddled. I’m sleep-deprived, exhausted, and yet she is so old, how can I consign her to the night air and the cold?
I awake at 5 a.m. with no bleats for attention— that every-other-hour irritating cause of tension. And yet what mixed emotions this five-hour rest has brought. Finally, a full-night’s sleep, but Annie I have not!
I knock upon the closet doors, follow every lead. I mix up her favorite cat foods, but she does not heed all these invitations—the water and the calls— the peering under beds, searching the bathrooms and the halls.
I look behind each open door, behind the stereo— so many hidden spaces where a cat can go. The old cat’s turned up missing? It’s an oxymoron that nonetheless is true when applied to my gray cat.
You may find it silly, putting up with such a cat once so wild and kittenish, so active and so fat. An outside cat who never deigned to come inside, Annie chose walls and bushes as places to abide.
Every year she grew more wild and more free, making an appearance on demand for only me. Twice a day for meals, she would jump up on the wall In between, she vanished—not visible at all.
Two years ago, four kittens abandoned at my door meant that she just left for good, and I saw her no more. One month later, she returned, hip shattered, skin and bone. with stomach and liver problems, she was Annie’s ruined clone.
When the vet said nothing could be done, she came to live inside. I thought, to make her comfortable there until she died, but two years later, she rules the house and she won’t abide any other lesser cat to be found inside.
She eats small portions all day long and though she’s lean and spare, it seems she’s come into her own in my cozy lair. The problem is, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since then. For all the constant roarings that disturb the old cat’s den.
If it isn’t food she wants, it seems it is a rub, or for me to clean her litterbox that’s found inside my tub that I haven’t used for the two years she’s been here. I use the guest room shower in lieu of one that’s near.
Sure that she’s died in some dark corner that I cannot see, I move aside the furniture. I peer on bended knee beneath the beds. I search each room with a fine-toothed-comb, but no evidence of her is left within my home.
I’ve thought so often how much easier that it would be if she would slip away one night and leave her master free. What a lovely gift it would be for her to give me, for often I have thought that probably she would outlive me!
The house seems oddly empty. By her water dish, her meal left uneaten these long hours has started to congeal. Her gray hairs left upon the rug where she liked to sleep. Although I’ve loved her absence, it’s true that now I weep.
When the other cats give voice and I decide to heed them, I get an extra surprise as I go outside to feed them. When I open up the door, Annie scoots right in, dashing from the overgrown foliage where she’s been.
Thus ends her great adventure and ends my great travail. As I sit here writing, I can hear her latest wail. I guess we’re back to where we were. Annie’s on my lap, and as long as she is quiet, guess I’ll take a little nap.
“Heading out this morning, into the sun
Riding on the diamond waves, little darlin’ one
Warm wind caress her, her lover it seems
Oh Annie, dreamboat Annie, little ship of dreams
Oh Annie, dreamboat Annie, little ship of dreams
Going down the city sidewalk, alone in the crowd
No one knows the lonely one whose head’s in the clouds
Sad faces painted over with those magazine smiles
Heading out to somewhere, won’t be back for a while”
Image by Clint Patterson on unsplash. Used with permission.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 