Friday, September 28, 2007

Cat Tales

731908_76331276 WHO DOESN’T HAVE THEM?  Cat tales I mean.  If you love/hate/like/put up with/or are stuck with a cat or cats this is for you. If you are an only-dog-lover, then skip this. It won’t make any sense to you.  Oh, by the way, I LOVE dogs too; we travel tooo much to have dogs.  Cats are glad when we are gone, they just pretend they aren’t with all the puking and ignoring when you get back. So: cat tales.
We had a cat named Napoleon, a big, orange tiger, male and sweet as can be.  For 11 years he was the best companion a person could have; always ready for a snug.  Smart as a a whip  ( BTW, are whips smart? I haven’t met a smart one yet.)He took sick one day and soon had  paralysis of the rear legs.  He was one hurting cat.  We did everything we could, massaged him, held him, talked with him, the works.  Just no good. The vet did his best as well.  It was a blocked iliac artery probably from feline leukemia.
831286_83976917     I would take him out onto the lawn and lay down petting him in the sun.  He couldn’t move much, but he would nose out what looked like different grasses and little plants.  He would look at me and then at the grass or plant and nibble them. Was he teaching me a cat’s pharmacopeia? 
     We live in the country surrounded by fields and forests. You don’t have to be afraid of cars most of the time. One day we were out on the grass and  I went into the house for a glass of water leaving Poleon lying there. When I came back I saw Poleon up on his legs, sun shining on his orange fur making it look golden.  He was like a lion, proud, powerful, fully alive.  He looked at me for a moment and then was gone into the thick field grass.
     “Stop!” I shouted, but he was moving fast.  How could he?  He was mostly paralyzed from the waist down?  But there he was headed for the edge of the field where there was an old stone wall. He was dragging his hind legs.
     A fierce tangle of bushes enveloped the wall, and Poleon literally disappeared into the maze.  Gone!  No answer to my calls.  Gone!
     It was his last fierce act of pride and life force.  He wanted to go off and die by himself with his own pride and feelings.
     My wife Shannon and I combed the fields and the bush-covered wall for the rest of the day calling for him. We continued our search into the dark.
     No luck.
     That night I got up about every two hours and with a flashlight went out trying to find and comfort Poleon.  Nothing.
     Well, three pretty sad days went by.  No sign of him.  He wanted to go off to die.
     Early evening of the third day, we were coming back to the house from some errand.  There is a large water barrel in the garden by the front door.  We heard a rumbling sound, low, muted but definitely a rumbling.
     It was Poleon lying by the cool of the barrel purring and purring. His eyes were bright and clear.  His rear legs were worn down to the muscles---all fur and top skin layer gone.  He must have dragged himself for miles, perhaps searching for some herb he wanted, or a special place to die, or for some reason we as humans will never know.
     But he was alive!!!
     What a celebration! A friend helped by massaging him and changing his leg bandages every day for a month and a half (our loved Mikey Levengood); the vet worked on him; and we gave him as much as we could of love and admiration.
     After two months the paralysis left and he walked again.  He never ran very much after that; but he lived for a year and a half, a good, strong life.
     Good on him.  What a cat.  He had a big, bushy tail.
~Ray
PS.
TEN IMPORTANT RULES FOR LIVING WITH CATS... IGNORE AT YOUR PERIL
  1. CATS RULE.  I MEAN RULE OVER HUMANS.  YOU CAN’T WIN.  NEVER, EVER.
  2. CATS ARE NOT TOYS. THEY ARE LIVING CREATURES.  TREAT THEM KINDLY AND CAREFULLY.
  3. DON’T GIVE IN EASILY WHEN YOUR CAT TRIES TO GET YOU TO DO WHAT HE/SHE WANTS.  ONCE YOU GIVE IN, IT’S ALL OVER.
  4. LEARN CAT LANGUAGE.  ALL CATS SPEAK CAT LANGUAGE.  LISTEN AND FIGURE IT OUT.
  5. KEEP WATER AND FOOD BOWL FULL ALL THE TIME-----OR WATCH OUT.
  6. ALWAYS BE LOVING TO YOUR CAT, EVEN WHEN YOU ARE MAD.  YOU GET MORE WITH HONEY THAN WITH VINEGAR.
  7. PET YOUR PET OFTEN.  DON’T RUB THE FURR THE WRONG WAY. 
  8. ASK CATS FOR ADVICE.  YOU WILL BE SURPRISED AT THE ADVICE THEY CAN GIVE.  TRUST ME.703700_11417377
  9. NEVER FORGET A CAT’S BIRTHDAY. THEY DON’T.
  10. IF ALL FAILS, GET A DOG!!!!!

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Bug Dancing

724830_butterfly_2 IT’S LATE AFTERNOON AND THE SUN IS SLINKING BEHIND THE MOUNTAINS.  Purple and green-black are the dominant colors beneath the sky.  But against the last slanting light dance a ballet corps of flying things.  Some are of impossible design making you wonder about the richness of our world.  Others are standard fluttering, hovering creatures ( bugs if you wish ) who are doing some last dance before the cold makes them cease.
       Is this dance of celebration?  Is it a last desperate mating ritual  to assure that next year the dance will resume, only with different players?
    I love this dance and watch until the sun is gone and the small creatures settle in the field.  What is their life span?  Will I see them tomorrow or not.  The question in itself is unimportant. I want no Faustian bargain.
     It gets cold fast without the sun, and I retreat inside.
Post Modernism. I’m back at my old shibboleth; can’t seem to let it go.  I guess I’m looking for easy answers to the plight I see worldwide.  If there are no answers to why and how we got to where we are  ----  70 plus armed conflicts right now, two nasty wars,  70% of earth’s population in poverty, global warming exacerbated by our species ----then we might as well just continue on our path.  Nothing to stop us.  At least that seems to be what post modernism means to me.  A culture that sees no moral absolutes, an anything goes philosophy, a get- it- while- you- can approach.  I’m being simplistic, but a head-long dash to self aggrandizement whether it be politicians, business  people, lawyers,  or just anyone who plays a zero sum game and sees no fault in that is playing a fool’s hand in a fool’s game.  For our species, it might be terminal.
That’s why I take pleasure in bug dancing.   Hint: look up modernism and post modernism on Wikipedia.  Look up Milton Friedman ( he had it wrong ) and J.K. Galbraith (he had it right ).
Not many people read my blog, so I can skate out onto this thin lake covering without too much worry.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Three Points of Contact

My love of mountains began when I was a kid.  There was a hill in our backyard, and I had a pair of skis.  Up and down, up and down I went, until I got older and graduated to the big hill on the golf course. Up and down again until I found Vermont and lift served skiing at Stowe and then at MAD RIVER GLEN.  Mad River became like home to me as it has done to so many.  It’s about mountains and the whole ethos of mountain life:  independence, reliability, planned risk-taking , and the glory of being alive on this fabulous spinning orb.
800pxtuckermanravineskiing_2I spread out to Mt. Washington and Tuckerman’s Ravine.  Again, you have to climb to ski.  It’s not a picnic, and it can be very dangerous:  falling ice, horrendous winds, avalanches, bergschrunds, whiteouts. It’s in New England, not far from Boston, and people often don’t think these kinds of conditions are there.  But they are. You are lucky if you find mountaineers who will share some of their knowledge with you.  I did.
Never go faster than your slowest person; plan; retreat if necessary.
I
In college I got to the alps and a mountaineering school in Switzerland in the small village of Rosenlaui in the Bernese Oberland. Towering mountains, glaciers ( now a lot of them are greatly diminished due to global warming) and European climbers.  Our guide was a Swiss named Fritz Imja and to this day his kind instruction, advice, and friendship have been a constant gift.  I’ll save some of the stories for another time, but here is one.
Thunersee.jpgThere were eight of us, two three person ropes and one two person rope.  We were on a nearly vertical face. I was in the middle of a three man rope.  Fritz was the last man on the rope.  I froze, clinging to the face like moss.  I couldn’t move.
Fritz said, “It’s OK, rest.  Then lean back, let your feet take hold on the rock.  Always three points of contact, two hands and a foot, or two feet and a hand.  You’ll be fine.  It’s a great day.”
And I was.

~Ray

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

All The Tea...

“AND HOW DID YOU FIND CHINA?”
“VERY LARGE, CHINA.”

                                …..from the play PRIVATE LIVES by Noel Coward.
Five thousand years of history.  What a magnificent culture. What a history. What art, poetry, philosophy, science.  Of course this was punctuated by politics and wars.
The T’ang Dynasty ( 618-907 ) was amazing for its unification, culture, peacefulness, fairness in governance.  Read some T’ang poetry and you will be amazed at how modern it is. Here is a sample:
Poem
It was their golden age.
China has come together and fallen apart many times.  Its land mass is so huge, its population always growing, and its 3 regions so diverse from wind blown steppes to the central loess plateau to the southern rice area this amazing land has been unified and then torn apart by war lords, emperors or invaders only to repeat the process.  And yet, it endures. Perhaps ancestor worship connects the past with the present and the present with the future giving a continuum that other cultures don’t have. Mao tried to wipe that continuity out in his disastrous Cultural Revolution which wasn’t cultural and wasn’t a revolution—it was a slaughter. Could it come apart again?
With 1.2 billion people today, we are seeing a huge China that embraces the modern world with a passion merging central communist control with market capitalism ---- and they are doing damned well.
China historically has not been militarily hegemonistic , its land mass and population has been too big.  But it now dominates the South East Asian area.  Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia all look to China for guidance and for support.  China has reached out to Africa as well.  It is not always humanistic, sometimes far from it, but never the less, China is the dominant player in a major part of the world and is growing.  Predictions are that its economy will be the world’s biggest in less than 20 years. It need not wage military war; economic competition is more than sufficient to gain suzerainty over much of the world.
Watch out USA, they own a huge amount of our debt---debt that pays for our unbalanced budgets and items like Iraq.  They might stop buying to let us afford our excesses.  They might even sell off our debt.
~Ray

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Flights of Fancy

778519_75718122 A great blue heron flew by my house this morning about 6:30; it was misty and the mountains were hidden in clouds.  The heron had its legs out straight and kept its wings moving in a slow, powerful cadence. I knew where it was going---fishing in the river down in the valley.  Later it would turn to the west and head for a island on Lake Champlain where there is a long-standing colony of herons.  They are wonderful creatures, and I always feel that it is a good thing to see them.    
     Across the valley from out house there is a gap or pass in the mountains. For reasons we will not understand migrating birds  use that pass as a sign post on their route to warmer areas for the winter.  Crows in huge numbers, sometimes filling old maple trees like black leaves, gather before going over the pass.  Smaller birds seem to just head for the pass.  Hawks go singly, or so it seems.  It’s a wonderful circus.  You can climb up to a lookout spot not far from the pass and watch these birds coming in ones and twos and threes and twenties. Thousands of them will go through that pass over the next several weeks.
     Once through the pass they fly on about half a mile and then suddenly hook left or south.  Is there a sign post out there?  Do their pineal glands respond to some deep magnetic field?  What do they know that we don’t know?  It makes me feel connected, not disconnected.  As a species we simply aren’t that smart.
    I’d like to be a bird—I think; but here I am and no wishing is going to change it.
Movie Review  ---  The Bourne Ultimatum
Well, well, well, three holes in the ground.  Matt Damon is always good, but this isn’t a film.  This is a high testosterone car chase without stop with gratuitous violence slathered on to break up the tire squeals and clanging metal crunches.  Whoop-dee-do!
Damon is better than this.  But maybe this is all we want.
~Ray

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

What a Stupid War

Onijingasa6     No, I’m not just talking about Iraq, I’m talking about war in general  --- really general. War between people, peoples, companies, ‘ismsBellicosity. What a word. Do we as a species love conflict?  Is that the way we succeeded with limited physical talents but brains that seem to expand?  Is male dominated fighting the ultimate crisis for us?
     Did you know that our total foreign aid budget for the year is around 17 billion dollars? 17 billion. 
     How much do we spend on Iraq? 400 billion and counting.  Some say it’s 9 billion dollars per month. Come on, this is simple; this war at the very least is not cost effective.  We are blowing up people left and right. We are destroying culture; we are encouraging peoples all over the world to hate us.
     Now, how about a different approach:  why not take some of the war spending and do health, education, and job training in the Middle East and elsewhere. 
      Just take 10% of what we have spent so far on the Iraq war. Can you imagine what that could have done or could now do?  Let’s think big, not small. Let’s go beyond conflict.
Spitfire_2      This is not about Pollyanna, this is about common sense.  But business schools don’t teach common sense, they teach the zero sum game and profit maximization.  After all some people ( not many) make fortunes off war. War works for some people. These people have power.
     Certainly we have to be prepared to defend ourselves; it would be irresponsible to be totally pacifist. 
     Now, how about the fact that 70% of the Earth’s population lives in poverty.  There can be turn-arounds, just look at India and China. I’m not a bleeding heart liberal, but let’s fight poverty and ignorance, let’s get kids to read and write, let’s stop just blowing things up.
~ Ray

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Seeds & Cabbages & Kings

819205_corn “How did the corn get to be what it is, Chini?” Lila aged 5 asked holding up an ear of corn.
     “Well, it grew,” I answered (another nickname for me is Chini).
      The inevitable came.
      “How?”
      So, that began a discussion of seeds and growth and minerals and water and nutrients and life force and energy.  When we got home, we sat at our outdoor table and shucked the corn for dinner.  I big flower garden surrounds the terrace, so I got up from the shucking and gathered several different seed pods.
     “Look, see these?” I asked and then broke them open. Each different type of flower produces a uniquely designed seed pod that offers up anywhere from a few large seeds to lots of tiny ones. Lila’s eyes widened and so too did Avery’s (aged 8).
     We talked about how life was stored in the seeds and how when the seeds got soaked in water and planted in earth  --- a mixture of ground up rocks and natural mulch from vegetation --- the seeds can release their stored life force and grow.
Dsc_0691_2     I am still amazed at this huge and wonderful mystery and take great pleasure in plants of all kinds from weeds to carrots to rice to strawberries.  The seeds are so varied, the plants are so varied, and yet the energy to grow to prosper is the same.
     Avery then and there decided to become a botanist.  She told Shannon that she would love to live in the jungle, thought a bit, and opined as how she would miss skiing.  Ah, to be 8 with such huge decisions to make.
     Lila came to me the next day.  She had gathered many pods, emptied them, sorted them,  and began to plant them.  Some she planted in the earth of the garden; others she put in an old Frisbee that she filled with earth and put on a rock in the field in front of our house.
     “Don’t forget the water,” I said.
      “I won’t,” she replied.  She didn’t.
      I hope they grow, but cold weather is coming.
If you want to know about the cabbages and kings, you’ll have to wait.
~Ray