Once by ice and now by fire, erasing her mistakes, Mother Earth must wonder how many times it takes to finally get the world planned right, for once the lot is cast, how can she watch sufficiently a planet that’s so vast?
Her hope is that but rarely she must resort to extinction to control a species risen to such great distinction that it uses up more resources than it can provide. How many times must she restore a planet that has died?
She casts a might yawn and then breathes fire once again— cancelling out excesses that they can’t see as sin. Caught in a clinch as they resist all means of education, perhaps the only answer is mankind’s eradication.
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
After a certain interval, my innocent young sister seemed to fall in love with each teenaged boy who kissed her, but these girlish fantasies just left her in a pickle, for as you know, boys in their teens are usually fickle. So, although each goodnight kiss to her seemed purely magic, its likely aftermath was more usually tragic.
He was in the place of honor at the head of the table.
Happy hands reached for truffles.
Becky took Forgottenman out to see it as well.
Sergio, David and Beth.
Sergio and David were especially delighted with their spinning, musical, light-emitting tops.
Wish I’d gotten a photo of all seven of these musical, lit-up tops all spinning together.
A few special libations.
Christine was feeling happy.
And now, the carnage afterwards.
A less than pristine table.
Warm Christmas Tidings
Christmas without frost can be merry nonetheless. You can have the camaraderie, the company and mess. Christmas in warm climates has all of the same joys, and even really old kids can enjoy sacks full of toys. Spinning tops with lights and music rounded out the night, Sergio and David thrilling at the sight. As old friends and some new ones met this last week of December to make another Christmas memory for us all to remember.
Those venerable among us have long since passed away, so we’ll make do with newer friends on this Christmas day. We will light our candles and cook the spiral ham. Eat the sugar cookies filled with nuts and jam. We’ll enjoy the babble around the Christmas table and squeeze another helping of pie in if we’re able. The sounds and tastes of Christmas are fraught with memories— with bubble lights upon the tree and packages to squeeze, but the nice thing about memories is that we keep on making them, for supplementing memories does not mean we’re forsaking them!
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”
A cow is screaming across the arroyo. Fireworks explode in honor of whatever saint’s day is being celebrated this week, drowning out her loud shrieking bellows. It is twelve hours later that someone finds the cow, her horns caught in the wire fence. Too late to save her, they do the kind thing and a single shot rings out. When her owner leaves her for the buzzards, a stench settles over the neighborhood, and we pay a man to cover her in quicklime. It is months later that someone ventures up to find a perfect effigy of the cow—jaws open in her last cries of agony. In mistaking concrete for quicklime, the man we paid to do away with her has instead constructed her monument. Immortalized on that mountain where few others will ever see her, I often see her in my dreams.
For dVerse Poets, we were to write a story of 144 words or less that made use of the line about the screaming cow above. You can read the stories others wrote on the topic by hitting the dVerse link above. This one is exactly 144 words. True story, by the way.
If our thoughts grew out of us in a gigantic bubble, perhaps they might give warning to keep us out of trouble.
They might flow on ahead of us in a big balloon
to tell folks what we’re thinking, like in a cartoon.
Sometimes our thoughts scream out at us. At other times they whisper. Sometimes our minds are in a fog. At other times they’re crisper, but with prior warning of dangerous or sad thoughts, perhaps our friends would intervene to circumvent bad thoughts.
Folks in crowds we’re entering might split to left and right when we’re in a pissy mood and spoiling for a fight. Those we meet might warn us of what we’re about to think, or chuckle at our naughty thoughts and give a little wink.
What would the world be like if folks knew everything we thought? One friend would know we hate her hair, one know we think he’s hot. There would be no mysteries, not one Christmas surprise. No detecting secret thoughts by staring into eyes.
The whole world would be literal. No nuances or mysteries. Strangers would know our secrets, both our present and our histories. No reading of expressions, for the truth would all be there floating in thought bubbles, right above your hair!
