old men are living history

i spent last weekend in refuge cove, on the secluded island of west redonda in a very small cabin at the top of a very large mountain with my mum, her bush-pilot lover, and their landlords (who are much nicer than mine, and who have now become family friends).

the husband part of this landlord duo is over 80 years old. he amazes me. he is fit, healthy, sharp, and has a pleasant and witty personality that's a pleasure to be around. he cut down ferns with a scythe while we were up there. he made us all a delicious dinner salad with home-cured olives. he cheated at speed scrabble. he says, "Once a Marxist, always a Marxist!" to describe himself.

he grew up jewish in brooklyn and as a young man, fought against the germans in WWII in northern italy. i asked him about the war and he said that war can be described in three words: stupid, stupid, and stupid.

even though he was the leader of a machine gun squad, he says he has never killed anyone that he knows of -- but he also said that with machine guns, you just spray a whole area with fire, so who knows what you hit. the two times he had a real person in his sights, and had to make a decision to shoot or not, something saved the day, and so he didn't have to kill them. one of the times a handful of germans were running away from his squad -- and one of his men shouted, in german, "Stop! Put down your guns, turn around, and we won't shoot!" two of the running men stopped, and so the other three or four who kept going were saved, because, of course, you wouldn't shoot at unarmed men with their hands in the air. the two who surrendered were so glad to be prisoners of war that they didn't even mind when H and his men raided their packs and ate their lunch (which, H tells me, is "illegal." such funny rules. killing, ok. lunch stealing, illegal.)

H saw many people die, and got a metal for bravery.

while helping to lug our provisions for the weekend up the mountain to the cabin, he said that it was easier to climb mountains 60 years ago.

he was 40 in the 60's. he was 40 when there were hippies. he grew up with people who knew what it was like to wear corsets, who knew what it was like without cars everywhere.

he has worked as an environmental engineer and urban planner all over the US and Canada.

he built the house that my mum rents from him. it's a little a-frame in the woods, overlooking an apple orchard and the ocean. it's all windows and weirdly placed electrical outlets -- like, in the middle of the wall, seven feet up.

he says the most amazing thing he's ever seen was one night, while driving alone in some remote and northern canadian location (i forget where) he suddenly came upon hundreds and hundreds of jack rabbits in the middle of the road. not little bunnies, huge jack rabbits. they all hopped away to let his car pass and no one has ever believed him.

he's an optimist -- he plants nut trees and expects to eat the nuts.

and i worry that when he and all his brethren die, we won't have a living memory of the horror of war in the same way. that we, in the so-called developed world, will lose even the possibility of having an immediate, collective, understanding of war, and of why it should always, always, always be the absolute last, last, last resort.

you know,

not long ago our landlords (who, sadly, are also our neighbours) presented us with a bill from the city for water and garbage pick-up.

now, i don't know how things work in your part of the world, but i've been renting one place or another for 13 years now -- since i left home, in fact -- and i have never ever been asked to pay the city tax on water and garbage delivery. nor do i know anyone who has. it has always fallen under the responsibility of the home owner.

i was incensed. but i said nothing and just chalked it up to what has become, in my opinion, our landlord's typical lack of generosity of spirit.

on an aside, for some reason, i never seem to get a handle on which day is garbage day around here. it jumps around. first tuesday, then thursday, and so on.

this morning, hearing the rumble of the garbage truck up the street, i ran around the house, a lunatic in a dressing gown, trying to accumulate our garbage. finally i had it bagged, and was heading down the back stairway, when i ran into our garbage man behind the house, looking for our garbage.

i live in an area where, if you don't put your trash out, the garbage men Come Looking For Your Garbage.

they're worth every penny we paid.

my garden has the best weeds

really! they're so pretty! the tiniest blue, pink, and purple flowers (teeny tiny!), robust and cheerful dandelions, and adorable, if strangely smelly little daisies.

anyone else notice anything spectacular outdoors, lately, that usually goes missed?

spring bug(s)

at this time last year i was walking to the local grocery store when i almost stepped on a caterpillar. i caught myself just in time, you'll be glad to know, and gingerly lifted the poor creature off of the sidewalk and out of harm's way.

little did i know that i'd be able to make a career of saving caterpillars within a few short weeks. the city was positively infested with them. they lived in the trees, in cobwebby 'tents', and, when fat, would fall to the ground (or onto my head, or into my open, laughing mouth. you know, that sort of thing). what began as an effort to save one creature, progressed to a general attempt at avoidance, and then further to my indifference, as i waded my way through the hairy jam that smeared the sidewalks.

this year, the plague doesn't seem as bad, but i can still see a lot of them up there in the cherry and apple trees, thrashing around in the sunlight, fattening up for their fall to earth.

i wonder why the birds don't eat them.

i wish they did.

food nazi

"can we get this?"

"no."

"WHY??"

"i'm not buying you junk food."

"it's NOT junk food!!"

"it's totally full of sugar. i'm not buying it for you."

"so?? WHY??"

"sugar makes your teeth rot and your brain shrink."

"No it DOESN'T!"

"yes it does."

"it does NOT!!"

"does too."

"NO it DOESN'T!"

"dude, do you want me to go online and find you all the studies that show the negative effects of sugar?"

"so?? i don't CARE!!"

"i can appreciate that you want this. i would have, too, when i was your age. and i can appreciate your frustration, and you're free to hate me right now, but i'm not buying it for you."

"but WHY??"

"uh... didn't we already talk about this?"

"i just DON'T understand WHY??"

"really? you don't understand? or, you don't agree -- because that's something different. if you're waiting until i say something you agree with, you might be waiting for a long time, because it really seems like you want this junk food and there probably isn't a whole lot i can say to change that, but you should, by now, understand why i won't buy it for you."

(exasperated sound from kid.)

me continuing: "look, i care about your health and well-being. i want you to grow up strong and healthy, not weak and gimpy with one tooth and a tiny, little, sugar-dried brain rattling around the base of your skull like an old pea."

"sugar WON'T make my BRAIN shrink!!"

"yes it will."

"NO it WON'T!!"

"yup. like a tiiiiiiinnnny little pea."

"ANNA?!? WHY can't you be SERIOUS?! i eat WAY less sugar than a LOT of other kids and they're FINE!!"

"well, they look fine now, but the shrinkage has probably already started. you mark my words: by the time they're twenty -- you'll hear that little pea quietly rolling whenever they shake their heads. then you'll thank me."

"WHAT?? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?? WHY can't you buy it JUST THIS ONCE?"

"really? just once? then you'll never ask me for anything like this again?"

"YES!!"

"nothing sugary until you move out when you're 18? ever? (look of panicked back-pedalling beginning to grow on kid's face) that seems like a pretty good deal -- ok, i'll get it for you now if you never, ever, ask me for a sugary treat again."

"well of COURSE i'll ask AGAIN!"

"ok, then what are we talking about here?"

"i just... (exasperated sound) WHY won't you GET IT??"

"i told you why. i have no problem buying you the odd sweet -- you know, like a donut, or whatever -- but i'm not going to stock the house with sugary treats so you can just have one any time you want. and we have practically no money, so, as a secondary point, i'm not going to spend what little we have on something with absolutely no food value. sorry. end of discussion."

but it wasn't the end of the discussion. it carried on for the entire walk home, with startling repetitiveness. at the end, he wound up crying. am i a food nazi? i feel like a food nazi. but, i mean, really, sugar is White Death. it's just not something to be consumed regularly. and we're so addicted to it. and it was almost unheard of until we europeans started "exploring" the americas and cash cropping. then there was so much of it that it was pushed on the motherland and we (especially the british) started eating pounds of it. to our peril.

i also don't see it as my proper place to endorse a sugary lifestyle to this child. it's his job to sneak sugary things behind my back, then grow to understand that it's a useless non-food as he gets older. it's my job to try to reign him in and steam him broccoli.

isn't it?

or am i just trying to replay my own youth and assuming that everyone else should live the way i did.

(but shouldn't they?)

(are there any job openings for fascists in my area? does
anyone know?)

rats! foiled again!

there i was, sitting in our backyard, sipping my morning protein shake and wiggling my toes, when one half of our stupid landlord duo emerged onto their back patio (which looks over our yard).

i steeled myself for further idiocy. what would she say this time? that we make dinner too late and that it disturbs her to see us, through the windows at night, cooking past 6 pm?

she said, "Hi Anna!"

then she complimented me on my gardening, saying i was better at it than her, and reached out further, adding that i must be an earth creature like her, who likes to get my fingers dirty.

that weasel.

in a minute and a half she robbed me of my ability to feel comfortable despising her. (regardless of the fact that i'm not earthy in the slightest. in fact, it's my chronically cerebral nature that makes gardening so appealing and restorative for me, because it's one of the few times i can forget myself and my chattering mind.)

but now she's human, not just a petty, miserly, control freak with no social skills. now she has dimension. she also confessed that she had to go in and soak her legs because she had just run 10K. how could it be worse?! now i'm forced to wonder if there are legitimate reasons for her failings as a landlord (and person), and if she might actually be, oh, i don't know, struggling just to be a person, like we all are.

curses!

an apology to geraniums and the elderly everywhere

i've had a thing against geraniums ever since i did a practicum at a greenhouse in germany at the tender age of 16. i don't think they, at the greenhouse, knew what to do with me at first, i could barely understand their dialect, but i wound up being in charge of the geraniums. i planted the seeds, transplanted the sprouts, and then the seedlings again. i got used to the smell of bone-meal and the tangy, peppery smell the geranium leaves would give off when i pruned them. once they were large enough, i delivered them, in enormously heavy containers, up ladder-like flights of stairs, to little be-moustached old ladies who would boss me around and require me to install their cement window boxes for them, then give me a five cent tip. i also planted a lot of geraniums in graveyards.

even then i found them drab, unimaginative, obvious, and over-done, like petunias, and i wondered why on earth people continued to grow either of them. they aren't even attractive.

and i've held this opinion for a good sixteen years then, suddenly, yesterday, i found myself at our local shopping plaza perusing the tempting racks of seedlings for sale. it was one of the first really warm days of spring, over 20 degrees, and anyone with a garden was just hopping to get digging. it was busy despite being a weekday. i had come looking for cosmos and lupins, and didn't find them, but noticed that a full two trolleys were occupied with various geraniums. trolleys that *could* have housed my cosmos, or some other actually useful or comely plant, had some one with any taste or imagination done the seedling ordering. i was indignant.

but then an angel passed, and i looked around me noticing my fellow shoppers for the first time. they were all old. they leaned on each other's arms, or their canes, smiling mildly at no one in particular, shaking slightly, large eyes, slowly looking the plants over, weighing, their gnarled fingers painfully prying the chosen, special plant from its tray, and then trying to find a way to carry it to the cash.

and i was ashamed. i saw myself in 40 years, poor, like most of the elderly, largely alone with a few small pleasures, apartment too small, and joints too aching and arthritic, for serious yard work, sitting on my tiny balcony above a city, remembering stronger, youthful, sunny days when i had had my own vegetable garden, and looking fondly over at my cheap, easily cultivated, arthritis-forgivingly low maintenance, single pink geranium in a pot on a table. a cheerful, living, thing that i could manage to have brighten my days.

i am penitent. i'm going to find a place in my yard for a geranium from now on.

garden bug

i have noticed two things since i have been spending more time in the garden lately.

1) worms are really strong, and really fast.

2) boys may actually be fundamentally different than girls. i've always come down on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate, but now i'm starting to doubt myself. sure we have different bodies, and this informs our experience of our realities and therefore ourselves, but i've always thought that this men are from mars crap about unalterable differences in hardwiring was, well, crap.

until i saw my stepson spend over an hour with his friends on the lawn trying to fart on each other's heads.

now, let's make one thing clear: i wrestled and climbed trees with the best of 'em as a child. it's not a matter of physicality that i'm trying to address here, it's something else. when G moved in with mum and i, when i was little, we would have serious tickleflights that entailed me shrieking, kicking, and squirming, like i was being murdered. when we were 8, N and i used to get naked, steal G's shaving cream, cover ourselves with it, then slide around in the bathtub together (!). i could hold a boy to the ground with one arm during kissing tag.

but i have never, ever, farted on my girlfriend's head. ever. and it's not because i'm prissy about farting. it has just never occurred to me. i don't just mean that it hasn't occurred to me as something interesting or fun -- it has simply never occurred to me, period. like eating phonebooks has never occurred to me.

but i hear that this is a totally normal and frequent occurance in the lives of young boys.

can you imagine? -- the next time i see ronnie or lela, i run for their knees to take them out, pin them to the ground, and fart on their heads? (ha!)

good lord.

i wish i wrote this story

but i didn't. it's by david sedaris, from his book, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" and i lifted it off of m's website (slomotion.blogspot.com). thanks m!

Us and Them

When my family first moved to North Carolina, we lived in a rented house three blocks from the school where I would begin the third grade. My mother made friends with one of the neighbors, but one seemed enough for her. Within a year we would move again and, as she explained, there wasn't much point in getting too close to people we would have to say good-bye to. Our next house was less than a mile away, and the short journey would hardly merit tears or even good-byes, for that matter. It was more of a "see you later" situation, but still I adopted my mother's attitude, as it allowed me to pretend that not making friends was a conscious choice. I could if I wanted to. It just wasn't the right time.

Back in New York State, we had lived in the country, with no sidewalks or streetlights; you could leave the house and still be alone. But here, when you looked out the window, you saw other houses, and people inside those houses. I hoped that in walking around after dark I might witness a murder, but for the most part our neighbors just sat in their living rooms, watching TV. The only place that seemed truly different was owned by a man named Mr. Tomkey, who did not believe in television. This was told to us by our mother's friend, who dropped by one afternoon with a basketful of okra. The woman did not editorialize - rather, she just presented her information, leaving her listener to make of it what she might. Had my mother said, "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life," I assume that the friend would have agreed, and had she said, "Three cheers for Mr. Tomkey," the friend likely would have agreed as well. It was kind of a test, as was the okra.

To say that you did not believe in television was different than saying that you did not care for it. Belief implied that television had a master plan and that you were against it. It also suggested that you thought too much. When my mother reported that Mr. Tomkey did not believe in television, my father said, "Well good for him. I don't know that I believe in it either."

"That's exactly how I feel," my mother said, and then my parents watched the news, and whatever came on after the news.
---
Word spread that Mr. Tomkey did not own a television, and you began hearing that while this was all very well and good, it was unfair of him to inflict his beliefs upon others, specifically his innocent wife and children. It was speculated that just as the blind man develops a keener sense of hearing, the family must somehow compensate for their loss. "Maybe they read," my mother's friend said. "Maybe they listen to the radio, but you can bet your boots they're doing something."

I wanted to know what this something was, and so I began peering in the Tomkeys' windows. During the day I'd stand across the street from their house, acting as though I were waiting for someone, and at night, when the view was better and I had less chance of being discovered, I would creep into their yard and hide in their bushes beside their fence.

Because they had no TV, the Tomkeys were forced to talk during dinner. They had no idea how puny their lives were, and so they were not ashamed that a camera would have found them uninteresting. They did not know what attractive was or what dinner was supposed to look like or even what time people were supposed to eat. Sometimes they wouldn't sit down until eight o'clock, long after everyone else had finished doing the dishes. During the meal. Mr. Tomkey would occasionally pound on the table and point at his children with a fork, but the moment he finished, everyone would start laughing. I got the idea that he was imitating someone else, and wondered if he spied on us while we were eating.

When fall arrived and school began, I saw the Tomkey children marching up the hill with paper sacks in their hands. The son was one grade lower than me, and the daughter was one grade higher. We never spoke, but I'd pass them in the halls from time to time and attempt to view the world through their eyes. What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone? Could a normal person even imagine it? Staring at an Elmer Fudd lunch box, I tried to divorce myself from everything I already knew: Elmer's inability to pronounce the letter r, his constant pursuit of an intelligent and considerably more famous rabbit. I tried to think of him as just a drawing, but it was impossible to seperate him from his celebrity.

One day in class a boy named William began to write the wrong answer on the blackboard, and our teacher flailed her arms, saying, "Warning, Will. Danger, danger." Her voice was synthetic and void of emotion, and we laughed, knowing that she was imitating the robot in a weekly show about a family who lived in outer space. The Tomkeys, though, would have thought she was having a heart attack. It occurred to me that they need a guide, someone who could accompany them through the course of an average day and point out all the things they were unable to understand. I could have done it on the weekends, but friendship would have taken away their mystery and interfered with the good feeling I got from pitying them. So I kept my distance.

In early October the Tomkeys bought a boat, and everyone seemed greatly relieved, especially my mother's friend, who noted that the motor was definitely secondhand. It was reported that Mr. Tomkey's father-in-law owned a house on the lake and had invited the family to use it whenever they liked. This explained why they were gone all weekend, but it did not make their absences any easier to bear. I felt as if my favorite show had been cancelled.

Halloween fell on a Saturday that year, and by the time my mother took us to the store, all the good costumes were gone. My sisters dressed as witches and I went as a hobo. I'd looked forward to going in disguise to the Tomkeys' door, but they were off at the lake, and their house was dark. Before leaving they had left a coffee can full of gumdrops on the front porch, alongside a sign reading DON'T BE GREEDY. In terms of Halloween candy, individual gumdrops were just about as low as you could get. This was evidenced by the large number of them floating in an adjacent dog bowl. It was disgusting to think that this was what a gumdrop might look like in your stomach, and it was insulting to be told not to take too much of something you didn't really want in the first place. "Who do these Tomkeys think they are?" my sister Lisa said.

The night after Halloween, we were sitting around watching TV when the doorbell rang. Visitors were infrequent at our house, so while my father stayed behind, my mother, sisters, and I ran downstairs in a group, opening the door to discover the entire Tomkey family on our front stoop. The parents looked as they always had, but the son and daughter were dressed in costumes - she as a ballerina and he as some kind of a rodent with terry-cloth ears and a tail made from what looked to be an extension cord. It seemed they had spent the previous evening isolated at the lake and had missed the opportunity to observe Halloween. "So, well, I guess we're trick-or-treating now, if that's okay," Mr. Tomkey said.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

"Why, of course it's not too late," my mother said. "Kids, why don't you... run and get... the candy."

"But the candy is gone," my sister Gretchen said. "You gave it away last night."

"Not that candy," my mother said. "The other candy. Why don't you run and get it?"

"You mean our candy?" Lisa said. "The candy that we earned?"

This was exactly what our mother was talking about, but she didn't want to say this in front of the Tomkeys. In order to spare their feelings, she wanted them to believe that we always kept a bucket of candy lying around the house, just waiting for someone to knock on the door and ask for it. "Go on, now," she said. "Hurry up."

My room was situated right off the foyer, and if the Tomkeys had looked in that direction, they could have seen my bed and the brown paper bag marked MY CANDY. KEEP OUT. I didn't want them to know how much I had, so I went onto my room and shut the door behind me. Then I closed the curtains and emptied my bag onto my bed, searching for whatever was the crummiest. All my life chocolate has made me ill. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but even the smallest amount leaves me with a blinding headache. Eventually, I learned to stay away from it, but as a child I refused to be left out. The brownies were eaten, and when the pounding began I would blame the grape juice or my mother's cigarette smoke or the tightness of my glasses - anything but the chocolate. My candy bars were poison but they were brand-name, and so I put them in pile no.1, which definitely would not go to the Tomkeys.

Out in the hallway, I could hear my mother straining for something to talk about. "A boat!" she said. "That sounds marvelous. Can you just drive it right into the water?"

"Actually, we have a trailer," Mr. Tomkey said. "So what we do is back it into the lake."

"Oh, a trailer. What kind is it?"

"Well, it's a boat trailer," Mr. Tomkey said.

"Right, but is it wooden or, you know... I guess what I'm asking is what style of trailer do you have?"

Behind my mother's words were two messages. The first and most obvious was "Yes, I am talking about boat trailers, but also I am dying." The second, meant only for my sisters and me, was "If you do not immediately step forward with that candy, you will never again experience freedom, happiness, or the possibility of my warm embrace."

I knew that it was just a matter of time before she came into my room and started collecting the candy herself, grabbing indiscriminately, with no regard to my rating system. Had I been thinking straight, I would have hidden the most valuable items in my dresser drawer, but instead, panicked by the thought of her hand on my doorknob, I tore off the wrappers and began cramming the candy bars into my mouth, desperately, like someone in an eating contest. Most were miniature, which made them easier to accommodate, but still there was only so much room, and it was hard to chew and fit more in at the same time. The headache began immediately, and I chalked it up to tension.

My mother told the Tomkeys she needed to check on something, and then she opened the door and stuck her head inside my room. "What the hell are you doing?" she whispered, but my mouth was too full to answer. "I'll just be a moment," she called, and as she closed the door behind her and moved toward my bed, I began breaking the wax lips and candy necklaces from pile no.2. These were the second-best things I had received, and while it hurt to destroy them, it would have hurt even more to give them away. I had just started to mutilate a miniature box of Red Hots when my mother pried them from my hands, accidentally finishing the job for me. BB-size pellets clattered onto the floor, and as I followed them with my eyes, she snatched up a roll of Necco wafers.

"Not those," I pleaded, but rather than words, my mouth expelled chocolate, chewed chocolate, which fell onto the sleeve of her sweater. "Not those. Not those."

She shook her arm, and the mound of chocolate dropped like a horrible turd upon my bedspread. "You should look at yourself," she said. "I mean, really look at yourself."

Along with the Necco wafers she took several Tootsie Pops and half a dozen caramels wrapped in cellophane. I heard her apologize to the Tomkeys for her absence, and then I heard my candy hitting the bottom of their bags.

"What do you say?" Mrs. Tomkey asked.

And the children answered, "Thank you."
---
While I was in trouble for not bringing my candy sooner, my sisters were in more trouble for not bringing theirs at all. We spent the early part of the evening in our rooms, then one by one we eased our way back upstairs, and joined our parents in front of the TV. I was the last to arrive, and took a seat on the floor beside the sofa. The show was a Western, and even if my head had not been throbbing, I doubt I would have had the wherewithal to follow it. A posse of outlaws crested a rocky hill top, squinting at a flurry of dust advancing from the horizon, and I thought again of the Tomkeys and how alone and out of place they had looked in their dopey costumes. "What was up with that kid's tail?" I asked.

"Shhhh," my family said.

For months I had protected and watched over these people, but now, with one stupid act, they had turned my pity into something hard and ugly. The shift wasn't gradual, but immediate, and it provoked an uncomfortable feeling of loss. We hadn't been friends, the Tomkeys and I, but still I had given them the gift of my curiosity. Wondering about the Tomkey family had made me feel generous, but now I would have to shift gears and find pleasure in hating them. The only alternative was to do as my mother had instructed me and take a good long look at myself. This was an old trick, designed to turn one's hatred inward, and while I was determined not to fall for it, it was hard to shake the mental picture snapped by her suggestion: here is a boy sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He's a human being, but he is also a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so that others may be denied. Were this the only image in the world, you'd be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there are others. This stagecoach, for instance, coming round the bend with a cargo of gold. This shiny new Mustang convertible. This teenage girl, her hair a beautiful mane, sipping Pepsi through a straw, one picture after another, on and on until the news, and whatever came on after the news.

academic snob weevil

my latest business enterprise with my sweetheart takes me to college and university campuses all over bc and alberta. while this is only our first week actively on the job, i have noticed a few things.

1) many university students look 12.

2) many university students act 12.

3) there is grave concern on the part of instructors over the vigorously burgeoning stupidity, from year to year, of first year students. universities have begun to offer remedial courses, and to consciously dumb down their existing classes to avoid needing to fail so many of their "clients."

4) evidence of this is everywhere at UVic in the form of shockingly simple bristol board "projects" all over the walls of departments. at first i thought it was a Science Thing: that because you get to play with rocks and bugs and formaldehyded frogs, you also get to use coloured markers and cut up magazine photos rather than employ overhead projectors and powerpoint in your presentations like everyone else who has graduated from junior high. but then i realised that it's not just a science thing -- the business department, languages, environmental studies, history -- all plastered with photos of malaysia and terrible, simple, hand-drawn graphs, or renditions of famous works of art, studies of the racoon, or photos of historic locals.

and, you know, i'm torn. i don't know whether to weep or applaud. i mean, i'm the product of waldorf education -- i'm All About pretty illustrations, the actively creative self, and drawing multidisciplinary connections. i don't believe that academia needs to be dry in order to be worthy. it's just that i can't help thinking that while grown-ups need to paint and colour, too, this sort of thing should really be happening a lot more than it is in elementary and even high school. by university, even creativity should be a lot more sophisticated than shoddy grade-six science-fair posters. i despair that we're raising a generation of adult children, unable to compose an appropriate, logically constructed argument, ignorant of basic grammatical rules and historical/scientific fact, incapable of writing in the cursive, numbed to math, and barely past the stick-man phase of illustration.

clearly excellence and learning haven't been a priority for these students (or, presumably, their teachers/our government) -- leading one to wonder why they're even bothering with university at all, but whatever -- i just wish that institutions of higher education would at least try to stem the tide of idiocy by not lowering their entrance requirements or changing their course content to suit nearly the lowest common denominator. if getting into university were actually more difficult than rolling out of bed onto the floor, then maybe we'd see some striving, and maybe we'd see some changes in our public school system for the better.

who, the trees! do you hear the birds gurgling?

today, J woke me up early to help him get out the door and on his way to the hills, so, after sloppy sandwiches were thrust into plastic bags, and paragliders packed into the car, i found myself standing in the yard, one eye open, in my pyjamas, waving absently at the receding subaru.

i turned, continuing to breathe, as is my habit, and my nose woke up suddenly -- the first part of me to do so.

the smell was gorgeous, sweet, delicate, tender. i sniffed ravenously, wanting to eat the freshness of the as yet unpolluted morning. i trudged a few steps towards the house, but missed the intersection that would lead me up the steps to the door, continuing, instead, around the side of the house, past the Freak Parsley.

i nodded solemnly to The Parsley (such a force of life seems to demand this acknowledgement. there is simply no stopping my Parsley, and i am a girl who pays her respects where respect is due). i passed the pretty-but-slightly-scary-in-an-extra-terrestrial-sort-of-way stripy, curly tulips and shuffled across the back of the house towards my new garden along the north fence. it's my route. i like to greet my plants in the morning. to check on them. on the way, i stopped to peer under the blooming cherry tree to look at my baby strawberry plants. all was well according to my one, half-opened eye.

then, somewhere between the cherry tree and the garden, my ears woke up and i was suddenly aware of the birds. how could i have missed them earlier? i felt surrounded by their delightful cacophony, and blessed -- like i was in a garden in paradise. i closed my eye and listened to the sweetest, most miraculous music i have ever heard in my life and felt grateful: for having ears that work, for spring, and mornings, and this little rented house with the huge yard, for weather and trees and birds and all natural phenomena, and for finding myself in the middle of it.

my toes communed with the baby slugs in the grass, the slugs that will grow to be as long as cats' tails and that will eat all my strawberries.

i opened both my eyes, this time, and took in the bovine feast that lay before me. the most tender shoots and leaves. spring always makes me feel like grazing. it's that pale green colour. i saw early morning golden light dance on each moist blade, illuminate each delicate blossom, saw it reach down to heat the dark chocolate earth where i will plant my little crop, and saw it lovingly encourage my pea sprouts to exceed themselves.

i wished i could spend my whole life at 7:30 in the morning, right here.

i'm shocked to think of how often i forget that this nourishing universe is at my doorstep. it's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that my day to day struggle with my own life, and the people and circumstances within it, are the only reality around me.

papal bull

two days ago, when i heard that the pope died, i found myself wondering how he was doing. i mean, he was quite conservative, as popes go, disallowing the existence of alter girls and other such nonsense, and the strict catholic notion of the afterlife is quite specific. so... i wonder how he's doing. i wonder how sweet the fruits of his labour taste.

nevermind the fact that no one has any clear grasp of what happens after death, that it's reasonable to assume that there aren't words or even non-verbal contexts in which to put the experience of being what we call "dead", nevermind all that. think, just for fun, what if he was mostly right -- but not quite completely? if there is a heaven, is the pope there? en route? or is he slogging his way through the bardo? having his heart weighed against a feather by anubis? if there is a heaven, and he managed to get there, would god be pleased with his work on earth, or would god look at him and say, "You know, you pretty much got it all wrong. You should have known better. 'E' for Effort. Into the Pit with you."

after a life of trying his best within his narrow framework of morality, influencing over a billion people, is being dead easier for him? is he being rewarded? is it what he expected? is he coming face to face with the sometimes heartbreaking results of his party line? is he being set straight by a female jesus? is he hunting the furthest shadows of the universe for our absentee watchmaker deity? how's he doing?

everlasting life in paradise is supposed to be the reward for a life virtuously lived and right now, the pope knows if it's a bluff or not.

mean bunny

you know, i realize that this sounds sadistic, but i derive a sharp, if guilty, pleasure from hiding chocolates on children. especially children who can be difficult. heh heh.

telling this particular kid that he couldn't have Any of his chocolates if he didn't find All of them was especially fun.

naturally i reneged, but his split-second look of panic was priceless.

who says stepmothers aren't really evil?

mean, mean bunny.

heh.

our back yard looks like a timotei commercial

...the blossoms waft gently to the ground in each gentle breeze, the long grasses (which should probably be mowed) sway...

now all we need is a long haired blond lady in a dress running in slow motion with a few butterflies.

(or was she riding a white horse? hm. i forget. hard to say. i think i may be confusing the timotei commercial with a liona boyd album cover, now. i can't remember.)

hawaiian bug

ok ok ok.

d, because of your comments on my last entry, i'm going to come clean on hawaii. it's going to sound like i'm complaining, though, which really isn't true. for the record, i had a pleasant time. the wind howled, which happens relatively rarely in southern bc, and which i love, so that was exhilarating, and when it wasn't howling, it was wafting, heavy with the smell goodness-knows-which colourful blooms that grew everywhere in extravagant abundance. visually, if there was a garden of eden, it would have looked like hawaii: tropical fruit trees growing casually about, as if this is what they always did, gorgeous and brilliantly hued flowers climbing and trailing all over the place, lush green grasses, towering palms replete with abundant clusters of coconuts, white sandy beaches, turquoise waters, black lava rock, jagged but green mountainous ridges like landscape wainscotting on the grandest scale, or like giant green curtains, reaching halfway up the sky and working with the cloud patterns to make the sun's light always appear in rays, rather than the more standard blanket of light found elsewhere in the world.

there were absurdly adorable tiny lizards all over the place, plus this mink-like animal, and there was a strange type of cardinal that looked like it had just emerged from the london punk scene 30 years ago, with its fluorescent red mohawk. we ate at a place called Luigi's, where dinner is cooked, individual order by order from scratch, by Luigi himself. it took us three hours to have supper. (i had a steamed broccoli salad with lemon and garlic, and a pasta dish with walnuts and capers and the like. it was very good.)

the temperature never swings too far on either side of a reasonable and comforting 25 degrees, all year around, and the water, always shockingly cool upon first exploration, never ceases to reveal itself as perfect after a moment's acclimatisation. i could have stayed in all day. there are few menaces in the water -- really only sharks (not in my area), jelly fish (cyclical according to the moon), sea urchins (only near rocks) and this weird little fish with a long nose that tends to break off in your skin if it accidentally bonks into you (didn't see any). i got stung by a jelly once, but it wasn't for the first time in my life, and who cares, so i kept swimming after a quick damage check. for the first week i had a weird rash on my neck, from the new bacteria in the water and all that, i imagine, but, really, what *doesn't* give me a weird rash? and just as there is little danger in the water, there is nothing to pester a person on land, either -- just centipedes, the odd scorpion, mosquitos, and bees. that's it. no poisonous spiders or snakes. being the united states, the infrastructure was reasonably good -- the buses regular, the water safe for drinking, that sort of thing. i mean, if you're going to go somewhere warm, but don't want to get sick or infected or bitten, hawaii's the place to go. a tropical paradise for the phobic.

and, of course, the fresh pineapple is out of this world.

this is all the good stuff. and it *is* good stuff. i liked it. i did. it was nice.

but, it's also still america, and oahu, where we were, has a huge military presence. there were "support our troops" stickers on everyone's car, and there was little in the way of vegetarian food outside of the healthfood store. the urban areas were full of chain stores in strip malls (why on earth would anyone come to hawaii just to go to The Gap?), everyone drives everywhere, and i couldn't for the life of me find an area of town with funky shopping, or a market where locals sold their crafts or anything more interesting than starbucks, jamba juice, ABC stores, and cheap bathing suit shops. i found this bland and disappointing. in fact, both locals and hotel concierges alike seemed mystified by my request for directions to an artsy area, or place where i could buy locally made stuff, or an old part of town, or something other than ugly, new, american, urban sprawl. i found no local colour, little social complexity, and no romance. not a single grass skirt, no visible history. the few native hawaiians i interacted with said "aloha" and "mahalo", it seemed, because hawaii's "aloha spirit" is its main marketing trick aimed at mainland tourists deciding whether to go to mexico or not.

also, because its economy is tourist driven, and everything has to be shipped in, prices are very very high, and in US currency (obviously). i was on a shoestring and couldn't afford to rent equipment or take lessons in surfing, or kite surfing (which looks really fun) at USD$295 a pop. as for snorkelling, i was discouraged by two people who told me that it didn't compare to florida (where i've gone) and is crowded and expensive, so i didn't bother.

the other thing that shaped my trip is that i was there by the graces of two of J's students, who paid for my flight. the boys were all there to paraglide, and so when i wasn't hanging around waiting to see where and if they would fly, i was making due with my own company. this is fine, and i knew it would be like this. it just means that J and i weren't exactly at large in hawaii, painting the island red. he and i arrived first, four days before the others, and initially, J was jetlagged from Australia and wanted to lie around, not having had a homebase for a month. somewhat frustratingly, and in opposition, all i had had for the last month *was* a home base and i was positively *dying* to get out and about. anyway, i managed to prod him out of the house a little bit and we and spent one day walking up the beach in one direction, and one day walking up the beach in the other direction, and one day hiking a ridge, and then the other pilots arrived and from then on they were in the air whenever possible. i don't drive, but i did take the bus on a few adventures while the boys were flying around -- one to waikiki, and one to a buddhist temple.

waikiki had two nice things about it: one was the most enormous banyan tree i've ever seen in the shockingly misnamed "International Market" -- it was so big it was mesmerising -- and the other was the sheraton hotel. it was beautiful and i would happily live there if everyone but the waitstaff would disappear. locals tried to dissuade me from loving the banyan tree, saying it was full of thousands of rats, but this made me love it even more. it was like a rat hotel! if i were a rat, i'd want to live there for sure! but anyway, waikiki wasn't really my thing. it's a tropical concrete disneyland and i found myself endlessly grateful that i wasn't staying there. it consists only of resorts and tourist traps squeezed together in each other's shadow. the only things to do in waikiki are sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers on a dismally overcrowded beach, getting burnt, or spend ridiculous amounts of money on greasy food, or cheap plastic crap "designed" in hawaii and made elsewhere.

i didn't really explore honolulu, of which waikiki is an area on the outskirts, and it may have had redeeming qualities in the way of a museum and gallery, or two. over all i found the city too hot and tiring, though, and not much fun without a buddy (where were you when i needed you, d?) so i didn't return.

before i left waikiki that day, though, i had really good kimchee-fried-rice near the rat hotel for lunch, and that's when i met Interesting Person #1. i sat eating at a table next to another table inhabited by a mousy, twitchy middle-aged woman and her burnt, tall, fat, red-faced grouchy looking blond husband waiting for their meal to be ready. they had new zealand or australian accents. the woman suddenly got up, clutching her backpack to her chest like a snuggly, and darted into the other seat at my table. she regarded me with sharp, bright, mouse-like eyes and said, breathy and quick, "Are you from B.C.?" i smiled, in what i hoped was a surprised and delighted manner, and said i was. she said, "I thought so. I just had to check or it would have bothered me." then she darted back to her table where she busied herself looking anywhere but at me.

i hounded her a bit, trying to make her happy that she had approached me, and trying to figure out where she could have recognised me from, but to no avail. all i got was that they were on a 6 hour layover from BC on the way to australia, and that they normally live in penticton and never go to victoria, where i live. her husband took off his huge leather jacket and handed it to her to put in her already teeming backpack. i said, still trying to put her at ease, "I hope he's not making you carry that! ha ha!" to which she replied in a startled but doleful tone "Oh! Yes. It seems to be my lot. My lot." And then she trotted off, dwarfed by her gear.

next, on my way home from waikiki, waiting for the bus, i met Interesting Person #2. he was a wino, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, at least half native hawaiian, and a former english teacher. he was greasy and smelly and reading a new-looking copy of something by henry miller. he seemed very concerned that i read henry miller, to which i replied that i already had, and he was visibly relieved. when he found out about my theatre degree, he launched into an animated discussion on the merits of teaching Jacobean drama to 8th graders over paltry shakespeare. he was learned and interesting, even if he did confuse King Lear with Othello and smell like rancid oil.

the buddhist temple, on the other hand, was a completely different experience than waikiki. it rests in the rainy, moist Valley of Temples on the island's windward side. it is an exact replica of a temple in japan and was finished in 1968 (i think) to commemorate the landing of the first japanese immigrants on hawaii one hundred years earlier. there was an enormous bell -- over 6 feet tall and five inches thick -- that one could ring by pulling a horizontal log on a rope outwards, then releasing it. the deliciously rich tone rang for minutes, cleansing the ringer's soul of temptations, or so the story goes.

there was also a small network of ponds filled with enormous koi. i was surprised to learn that koi can live up to one hundred years. to encourage their longevity, i bought a little bag of fishfood from the lone staff member on the site (a notably contrary and ignorant young white woman), and tossed some of it's contents onto a dazed group of fish crowding motionlessly on top of each other in the water by the side of the bridge. the food made them wake up and they thrashed around gulping for it. then the birds came. not to be bothered by the fish, and possessing a (i thought) peculiar taste for fish food, the birds would catch the food i threw in mid-air, or even briefly land on the fish to quickly nab the pellets before they sank or were gobbled.

i soon forgot the fish altogether and busied myself with the birds as they landed on my hand and arm, hanging out, just waiting until i provided more food.

there was also, of course, a large buddha inside the temple. it is the largest wooden buddha carved in the last 900 years, or so the temple literature claimed, and was covered in a lovely gold leaf that had begun to wear off in places. the eyes were carved so that they looked like they were watching you and you felt that that mischievous, yet serene, smile was actually for you.

after the temple i went to the nearest strip mall to forage for lunch and met Interesting Person #3. he was an asian local and had some interesting views on god and the military and george bush, but i forget every one of them. he and i found each other because the ceiling was dripping brown creepy water by my table at the little food place, and his was the only other, so i imposed myself on his company.

on one raining day, too, i was lucky enough to convince the boys (with the car) that we should go to the north shore. this is where pipeline is -- the famous beach, and the famous surfer competition named after it (or is it vice versa?). we missed the competition by a few days, but there were still surfers there doing their thing. they are insane. that water is insane. the waves are monumental and they arrive onshore at such an angle as to pretty well guarantee you a broken neck or death by drowning if you don't know what you're doing. i didn't even put my toe in. near pipeline is a little town called haleiwa. it is what people consider "old hawaii" and it was by far my favourite spot.

haleiwa is small and quaint, and the road leading up to it is full of ramshackle houses with laundry hanging off the line and chickens in the yard. seeing this i heaved a sigh of contentment. the town itself is a little cluster of low sitting wooden houses containing small galleries and craft shops, little bakeries, restaurants and funky one-room museums dedicated to things like surfing. it had personality. i liked it. we spent the afternoon there, and then on the way home, we stopped by a pineapple stand and bought arm loads of pineapple from a very large and very smiley soft-spoken, shy-seeming young hawaiian man.

and that's about all that's noteworthy about my trip. over-all, hawaii felt like a pretty and warm place to go swimming. it didn't strike me to my core the way northern canada did, or various spots in europe did. i encountered none of the magic you hear about, but then, i only stayed on oahu. it's possible that i'm really no better off than all those unfortunate souls who stay in waikiki. if i went to maui or the big island, perhaps i would have had a different trip altogether.

and i would love to put this theory to the test next year. no matter what, it's always nice to go somewhere warm and sunny after the gloomy westcoast winter. it lifts the spirits, stupid tourist traps or no.

so, d, does that satisfy your curiosity?

flatfoot floozie on the fly fly

every once in a while i pause and thank my forgetful and somewhat scattered nature for encouraging humility in me, and a sense of humour. this morning, for what was certainly not the first time, and most likely will not be the last, either, i found myself woken up by the garbage truck, and the subsequent bleary-eyed, half-dressed dash after it, holding a big, stinky, drippy bag of trash. this experience, and the solitary giggles enjoyed shortly afterwards upon private reflection, are surely lost on those of us who are mindful/diligent/organised/rhythmical enough to find a way to remember garbage dates -- or, at least, to write them down and then remember to look at them.

i figure that organisation is a small price to pay for ongoing subjective hilarity.

(yes, that's it: it's not that i'm allergic to mundane details, it's that i've sacrificed my attention to worldly matters at the alter of The Absurd, and her twin, The Goofy.)

it's now 7:45am on my last day in hawaii. i'm alone, after my mad garbage truck chasing jump-start to the day, packing and doing laundry before we leave for home. the boys have gone off to try to squeeze in one more flight before we leave, and
i found a lizard in the dish cupboard. it was outrageously cute and i took a ridiculous number of pictures of it (with the flash on, poor thing). it is very lovely here, but i have to say, that it hasn't tugged at my heartstrings at all. i would come back, if it was easy and made sense. it's quite agreeable and very pleasant and pretty, but is somehow lost on me. i don't know why.

anyway, time to get packing....

snot loaf

along with insects, weird things floating in the water, and chatty crazy people, i seem to attract food industry horror stories. i'm not sure if i perceive these horrors more often than other people because i'm a hyper-vigilant person, or if the restaurant gods are actually mischievous, but there it is: gross things happen when i try to eat out.

and it's funny because i've worked in the food industry. i'm very supportive of wait-staff. i never make a fuss or behave in a rude or obnoxious manner in restaurants, and i always tip at *least* 15%, so i can't imagine that it's restaurant karma. although... hm. i suppose it could be germ karma, since i am rather, um, shall we say, 'aware' of the ways in which potentially harmful microbes can be transfered....hm.

anyway, aside from the very ordinary assortment of discovered hairs, bugs, and incorrectly filled orders, the best story i have happened at subway. i ran in quickly on my busy, errand-filled lunch hour to grab a sandwich. i ordered. the woman nodded, and grabbed a pair of those plastic sanitary gloves that all subway workers wear to assure cleanliness. she put the gloves on, and stuck her left index finger deeply into her left nostril.

she stopped, suddenly aware of what she had done, her finger still buried up to the first knuckle, but safely protected from her own boogers by the plastic glove. she stared at me. i stared at her. the rest of the world came to a standstill, except for maybe one lone cricket sounding in the distance. time passed.

she stood transfixed, like an animal caught in the headlights of my awareness. it was like she suddenly realised that air is a two-way medium and that if she could see me, i could see her, and the cogs began to slowly grind to life as she tried to decide what to do.

should she apologise profusely, remove the finger, wash her hands, change gloves and just keep on apologising and offering me free stuff?

should she apologise, distract me with a few brain fart jokes and try to get me on her side as a fellow harried person who sometimes just did the craziest things, as she washed up and changed gloves, offering me free stuff?

or, should she pretend that nothing happened and carry on as normal?

evidently she chose the latter, because, keeping perfect, startled, eye-contact with me, she slowly removed her finger, and then slowly reached over to the bread i had requested and wrapped her fingers around it, preparing to cut it for my sandwich.

at this point i jumped about four inches in the air and squeaked something about having changed my mind as i bolted for the door. as i was leaving the manager rushed out from the back, grabbed the snot loaf and waved it in the air as she shouted, "i'll make it for you! i'll make it for you!"

not to be thus reassured i was already out the door and halfway down the street.

and, you know, this is just the tip of a giant iceberg of restaurant stories that i have. most people are incredulous when they hear claims that before we die we eat two pounds each of stranger-drool, insects, hair, and rat turds, but i totally believe it.

what's she building down there?

something weird happened to me a week ago. i became obsessed with the basement.

it was a few short days before i was scheduled to depart on a much-needed holiday and there i was, digging out the most obscure boxes, sorting and weeding through their contents, while spinning around cleaning madly like a runaway ferris wheel made of june cleavers.

i actually chafed the insides of my thighs with all the brisk walking about and cleaning.

and, you know, i'm really not a cleaner. i mean, i've lost roommates because i Just Don't Clean.

and i'm not using the word 'obsessed' lightly, either. every night i was up until 4 am, at which point i would reluctantly admit that i should probably go sleep. i would then lie down, only to toss and turn as my thoughts yelled at me.

at the same time i found myself freakishly moody. tears and anger were always barely beneath the surface, and, at one point, as i swept maniacally and wondered why on earth i suddenly cared about my basement, an exercise my class did in grade 11 (?) english came to mind. we were learning the story of parcival as an allegory of human development and wound up doing a number of jungian based personal exploration exercises to compliment our lesson plan. one of them was to design the perfect house in detail. after our houses were completed, we were told that the contents of the basement were supposed to reflect our basic needs and subconscious.

i stopped sweeping up the shocking numbers of fruit fly carcasses and dust bunnies and surveyed my subconscious. all the stress of being alone with a demanding and often difficult child for the past month, added to all the ways i normally beat myself up and fret about what i'm doing or not doing, about my future, about my partner, all of it, swirled around me. i grabbed a scrub brush and attacked.

i couldn't even imagine making it to hawaii. i began to wonder if i was freaking out about the house because part of me knew my plane was going to crash, or something, and i didn't want to leave a mess for my loved ones. i wondered if i was losing my (already suspiciously tenuous feeling) grip on sanity. i wondered a lot of things, growling at any person i had to interact with and protecting the cleanliness i had just created with a vicious ferocity.

this tuesday i flew to hawaii on, i noticed, a surpassingly dirty plane, and while i resisted the urge to clean it, i did glower from time to time at the antique-looking crud seeminlgly caught mid-dribble all around my little fold-up eating table. i'm still feeling unusually emotional, but seeing J has been really lovely. we've been shamelessly slovenly, getting up late and wandering along the beach for hours. the trade winds have been howling, jiggling the coconuts on the trees ominously, and playing with our hair. everyone has banana, papaya and date trees in their yards like we in canada may have spruce or cedar. the flowers smell glorious, and the water is breathtakingly warm, blue, and inviting.

and, to sweeten the deal, when i do finally go home, it'll be to a clean house!

the leprafurger

this is a story that step-bug wrote for school. they were asked to draw an imaginary creature and then to write something that described the drawing and what the creature is like. j chose to draw a leprafurger, and what follows is his description:

The Leprafurger


The Leprafurger preferably eats pickled staplers through the blue stars on his feet. He is a singular species, and can be found prosperous in Southern Arabia. When in hibernation, the Leprafurger unconsciously eats nuns through a straw. All the black lines and dots on the Leprafurger are used to scare away the farmer that is constantly trying to baptise him. Lemon is his favourite word, though he hates limes. There is no animal that doesn’t fear him, and he lives in a tree. The only thing the Leprafurger is afraid of is mustard. He uses his giant brown thumbs to hear. He is in constant solitude when not being chased by the farmer and his holy water. He uses that time to tell his only friend, Fred the worm, that he feels the inner machinations of his mind are an enigma, and that when he changes color for no reason, he says it’s because he must obey the inscrutable exhortations of his soul. Since he uses his thumbs as ears, he uses his ears as thumbs. The symbols on his body, as in the hourglasses and oddly drawn ‘4’s’, are graffiti as a result of sucking nuns through a straw. He has an average life span of 300 years.

will you be my briny valentine?

i've fallen in love.

with sauerkraut.

there isn't much else to say, really. sauerkraut, you are perfect. salty, tangy, full of friendly bacteria because you are un-pasteurized, happily peppered with little caraway nubbins.... who needs hot dogs? i eat you by the bowl-full.

* * *

i first came across this crispy, juicy, unpasturized sauerkraut at the annual victoria health show last weekend, and, after just one sample, bought a whole bottle (and then ate all the other samples). i mean, how could i not? it was like eating crunchy, shredded dill pickles, which, as any of you who know me will confirm, i can eat by the jar-full (pickles i'm talking about here. and olives).

other highlights of the show included this rogue band of vegan seventh-day-adventist senior citizens bent on curing the world's problem with heart disease by touting the benefits of a plant based diet; alarming looking 'probes' filled with tumbled semi-precious stones and attached to very large generators; a woman who would hold coat hangers in front of her, as dowsing rods, then move them dramatically apart from each other to show the expansion of your energy field if you put your hand on your head to "centre" yourself; and john gray himself, touting his latest 'men are from mars' book.

as soon as i noticed john gray i vowed to give that guy a piece of my mind, but as i paused to organize my fit i think i was distracted by the electric amethyst 'probes' and forgot all about him until after i had left. oh well.