June 20, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: Work all day today. When I get home about 6:30, no one is here. The Boy has gone back to NYC; Moi has taken Atlas back to Jazz’s, where she finds it less stressful to watch him. Moi has left a note on my computer monitor that says “Mway needs supper,” “Chickens need locked up.” I find Mway on Moi’s bed. After I put on my walking clothes, then go downstairs to put on my boots, gloves, and safari helmet, Mway comes down to the kitchen, ready to go for her walk.
State of the Path: The chickens come running up to me, with their peeps following behind them. Mway and I head to the path. Just before the pig pen, in the middle of the path, I see the conspicuous plant with long spiked green flowers which I haven’t mentioned before because I didn’t know what it was. But since yesterday, when I was leafing through the Audubon, I think I can confidently say that this plant is a common ragweed, to be distinguished from the great ragweed, which I’m more familiar with, because most years we have that growing in great numbers, to its maximum height of fifteen feet. I haven’t yet this year seen great ragweed growing to that kind of height (except that one time by the summer house), but I do also see it coming up around the place, perhaps more than the common ragweed. On the side path, I refrain from eating any raspberries, because I’m afraid of getting the seeds stuck in my teeth. But when I get down to the creek, there’s a stand of raspberries with so many ripe ones that I cannot stop myself from eating some of them; I just make a point of chewing on the better side of my mouth. All along the path, I notice how some of the plants seem bedraggled because of the dry weather, especially the touch-me-nots. In fact I touch some of the touch-me-nots and discover that they lack all that spring which they usually have and from whence they derive their name. Not one of the touch-me-nots which I touch twinges or coils up (like they do I guess to spray their seeds); and this suggests to me that these flowers have bloomed prematurely this season. On the board on the ground near the wigwams, I see the pile of turds Mway left there yesterday. Coming up to the clearing, I see several of the white flowers with fern-like leaves that I’ve seen before and didn’t know what they were. But again, after leafing through the Audubon, I think I can confidently say these are Queen Anne’s lace, or wild carrot, which is a plant I think I should have recognized but perhaps didn’t because of how they were situated. I see a lot more of the yellow flowers that I saw before, and judging from their leaves it seems to me that they might be what Moi calls goose grass, or bed straw, now in flower. But the pictures I see in Audubon for bed straw and goose grass looks nothing like this. I also see some violet flowers and lavender flowers growing just before bug land; but, right now, I don’t even feel like leafing through the Audubon to try to guess what they might be.
State of the Creek: It seems to me that some of the pools in the creek are starting to dry up, as I notice some wet mud among the rocks. Particularly along the crest of the skating pond, it seems to me that what used to be one long pool has now divided up into two smaller ones, with dry rocks in between. Still I hear some frogs leaping into the water as I walk along.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, Mway fetches the “pro-quality” stick more times than I care to count, but not as many times as she was doing when Atlas was around. When we get back to the back yard, I think about my chore of having to lock up the chicken cage and expect that I’ll have to wait a while before I have to go out and do that. But when I get back, the chickens have already all gone back in their coop, and conveniently all I have to do is shut and latch the cage door as I’m walking by.
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M, I’ve scrounged around and have found some of the books you asked about, as well as some others. I didn’t find any of the Little Golden Books, any Shel Silverstein, or Gary Larson. I found “The Magic School Bus: Inside the Human Body,” Dr. Seuss’s “The Butter Battle Book,” Calvin and Hobbes’ “Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons,” Steig’s “Doctor De Soto,” Eric Carle’s “The Very Busy Spider,” Hillary Knight’s “Cinderella,” a Disney version of “The Gingerbread Man,” a 1949 reader entitled “Three Friends,” an Illustrated Classic Edition of “Tales of Mystery and Terror” by Edgar Allen Poe, and an October 1996 issue of Teen Beat. I’ve laid these out on the armchair. I’m also making sure I position the chair in front of the computer in the right spot.
And see, this is just a tip of the iceberg I was able to snoop through (apologies for the bad metaphor – we live in a time, anyway, of the Bad Metaphor, don’t you think?). And at the same time I was sniffing through perhaps hundreds of children’s books, I was already poking around in dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammar handbooks, whatever was in reach, and at night whenever I had a chance I would take in a big whiff of whatever Moi was reading at the time, books on surviving in the wilderness, bear hunting, explorations of the Far North, investigations into unexplained phenomena. For you see, I have no choice but to describe the process of learning to read in a simple linear fashion, when in fact the process was circular, curvilinear, whatever. I’d get the gist of something one day, a few days later understand it a little better, then realize I was in error, correct myself, correct my correction, then finally see that my error was not so incorrect in a different context. I was seeing the same words, phrases, all over the place, in similar combinations, in different combinations, in similar or different contexts, their meanings accreting, a “there” here, a “here” there, “in this place,” “in that place,” “at that time,” “with this,” “with that,” “when the sun was coming up” “or” “when the sun was going down” while some “little” or “old” thing or other was “busy” “eating” or being “eaten,” all of which “was,” “is,” or “will be.” See, here, in this Cinderella book: it begins “Once upon a time…” Suddenly once upon a time “once upon a time” makes sense. Disney’s “Gingerbread Man,” interestingly enough, dispenses with the phrase (not to mention the little boy): “In a little red house up on a little green hill, there lived a little old woman and a little old man.” “The Very Busy Spider” begins “Early one morning…,” and “Early one morning” is the first chapter of “Three Friends,” and at the beginning of the book “it is early in the morning.” “The Butter Battle Book” starts out “On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall…” “Inside the Human Body” begins “It all began when…” In Cinderella “there lived a merchant, his beloved wife, and their beautiful little
daughter.” In Disney’s Gingerbread Man (as I mention already above), “there lived a little old woman and a little old man.” In the Scholastic “Gingerbread Man,” “there was an old man and an old woman and a little boy.” In Disney’s “Gingerbread Man,” “they kept busy…picking apples.” In “The Very Busy Spider,” “she was very busy spinning her web.” In Disney’s “Gingerbread Man,” “the gingerbread man did get eaten…” In “The Butter Battle Book,” “every Zook eats his bread with the butter side down.” In “The Very Busy Spider,” a cow asks the spider “’Want to eat some grass?’” In “Taxi Dog,” “I ate and I ate, I cleaned the whole plate.” In the visual glossary “What’s What,” there’s a picture of a “dinner plate” as well as of “butter plate” as well as of a “backplate” and the “fan plates” on a suit of armor which is near the pictures of a “bow and arrow,” a “shotgun,” and a “tank,” which all look similar to Seuss’s “Triple-Sling Jigger” and “Eight-Nozzled, Elephant-Toted Boom-Blitz.” M.
Today I went online to see what I could learn about the alderbush, and immediately learned that alderbush is indeed a misspelling when the search engine prompted me “Do you mean alder bush?” The very first entry for “alder bush,” at webshots.com, showed a photograph of a shrub that looked strikingly familiar, but there was no commentary, and no indication (to me at least) what this website was about, except that I could probably use a charge card to purchase the photograph I was looking at. The next few websites listed were about alder bush removal, then finally I came to a wikipedia article for “Buckthorn,” including the “Alder Buckthorn.” “The Buckthorns (Rhamnus) are a genus (or two genera, if Frangula is treated as distinct) of about 100 species of shrubs or small trees from 1-10 m tall (rarely to 15 m), in the buckthorn family Rhamnaceae. They are native throughout the temperate and subtropical Northern Hemisphere, and also more locally in the subtropical Southern Hemisphere in parts of Africa and South America. Some species are invasive outside their natural ranges.” From the few photos in the article, I immediately knew that what I’ve been calling red willows, and what I will later tentatively call “chokeberries,” are some kind of buckthorn, most likely an Alder Buckthorn. Another article on this particular species discusses the problem of controlling this invasive shrub and mentions that the Greek physician Galen “credited [it] with the power to protect against witchcraft, demons, poisons, and headaches.[citation needed]” Why didn’t Moi come up with the term “alder” when I asked her about this shrub last year?
A few days ago when I first saw the flowering alder buckthorns down near bug land, the shrubs dredged up a memory of almost Proustian intensity, of almost “eidetic image” quality, of the same kind of shrub sitting in my parents’ back yard next to a wildly sprawling forsythia, sitting there, near the end of a clothesline, not far from a bird house, for as long as I lived there and probably for as long as my parents lived there and were alive, a shrub, with clusters of little star-like flowers and rusty ovate leaves, which I’d entirely forgotten about until then, staring at this thing I could not name. The memory was accompanied by a feeling, a neural citation, if you will, telling me “this is a bona fide memory, a recollection of something that once actually existed,” soon modulating into a feeling of shame, astonishment, and bemusement that after 56 plus years of life I still did not know the shrub’s name, then dispersing and changing, for the very reason that I didn’t know the name, into a feeling of doubt about the accuracy of the memory. The doubt lessened, however, as the “memory image” persisted in my mind, as it persists in my mind still. Of course, as M tells us, a memory is but a sign, of a necessarily absent referent, a referent that need not exist. Perhaps the bush is still at the house, only about 2 miles away, and I could drive there and find it, though I doubt it; the new owners have re-modeled the house and re-landscaped the yard. I have a feeling they’ve pulled the shrub out.
In her comment above, M stated that we live in a time of “The Bad Metaphor” and asked me if I agree. At the time I didn’t reply, probably because I didn’t have the time to think about it – but I also thought the comment seemed silly and pretentious – certainly baffling. But now, because of a comment she made today (see a much later comment, dated March 18, 2013), I think I see what she means. If M is right, then we’ve been living in the Age of the Bad Metaphor since about the year 1659.
By the way, the metaphor that M uses above (snooping through the tip of an iceberg) is more properly called a mixed metaphor (probably the combination of a dead metaphor and a hackneyed one), which is why it is bad, if it is indeed so. M’s apology should, of course, be readily accepted. I’m sure I’ve dropped bad metaphors myself all over the place in this blog.
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