I am not sure when grief councillors got invented, but it seemed to happen sometime during my teenage hood. Something horrible would happen and on top of the usual aftermath a horde of professionals, whose careers depend on lengthening the grief response, would descend on the hapless survivors.
The good that has come from this is the recognition that the horrors we witness do not leave us, and for some become demons that cannot be tamed. And one must learn from the past, however bitterly painful. Why am I being so cheerful? Because I was thinking this morning about poor Robin Williams and the people I have known who took a similar path, and then after a moment of remembering to remember the best not the worst of a missing teenage friend in particular, I straightened up both the counter and myself, and thought about how to write about mental distress. But just as I cannot stand and weep at what might have been, at least not for more than a little while, you do not want to read about me weeping.
The pots and pans we have been obsessively discussing come from the reality of everyday living, the soup that got us through the dark ages. The plants in the garden that will wither without a little care … today. Those everyday cares that push aside the darkness and that others sometimes lose sight of are the stepping stones of life.
And my birds need feeding, squirrels be damned.
[It is surprisingly easy to make homemade suet cakes for birds, and as many of you [many, ed.?], dear readers, have been known to eat bacon, you will be glad to know that bacon fat makes an excellent beef suet replacement. Basically you mix an equal amount of lard and chunky peanut butter, some cornmeal and oats to help bind it, and then any dried berries or nuts, and some bird seed, if you happen to have kilos of it from before the invasion of the pigeons, which led me to this much more economical and enjoyable bird-feeding habit.
And there isn’t poop all over the neighbour’s car.]
I remember a story about a couple stuck somewhere in a jungle, and suffering terrible stomach woes. There was a well nearby, and every day they made the effort to draw a small amount of water, keeping going for a week until finally rescue came, only to discover a dead bird in the well, which had been poisoning them. You just can’t keep going back to that bird water …
I am also going to practice writing with my right hand … so any port in a storm so to speak to still the mental squall, any metaphor in a crisis, and always a squirrel to be spotted, just when things are getting out of hand. As my two eldest used to say to Mikey, “Look, a distraction!”
Mikey, in front of a very large distraction.
I hope you can find a smile inside this Friday, and maybe you can use it to distract someone, even yourself.
I can’t believe I used the wrong hoard/horde. I almost always catch some obvious typo or grammatical faux pas only after I hit the Publish Button. There is a Preview button, which I use, which shows me exactly how the post will appear. But it is like a rule, and it was true when I worked more back at the U of T Press, and with my dad, that after the most painstaking proofreading process, a book would get published, and there in the introduction, or first page, would be a glaring error, like a friend who wrote and handed in an essay that was part of our black belt process, and only afterwards noticed that she had written Marital Arts instead of Martial Arts in the title, which was extra funny, because she was the quite out partner of the ex-wife of the fellow who ran for one of the two Communist parties that made it onto our national ballot, and who also did karate with us, as did his two lads. We only found out about the running for the Communists late in our relationship, and it was astonishingly fitting. But there were more stoners than commies in the riding, and anyway it is always Liberal or NDP, so you can vote for whomever you want, really. I think it is what is called a “safe” seat.
hoard horde … grrrr
Now this guy has it down:
a horde of crows, a descent of woodpeckers…
http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Pointless/AnimalGroups.html
everybody have a nice Labor Day weekend! especially Xty, even though you don’t spell it right.
Animal Collective Nouns- So we guys are in the Cete State, hunh? Chicago Sloth seems appropriate. Wouldn’t mind a whole Colony of Beavers (sorry). Don’t want a Wreck of Sea Birds. Or an Obstinacy of Buffalo. A Lap of Cod? How about my Cod in your Lap? (again, most sorry)- unless you have a Cast of Crabs (done bein’ sorry, deal with it).
And a Memory of Elephants? How prophetic. At least we’ll most likely have an Implausibility of Gnus (news) for a while longer.
Alas, beware the evil-eye Gaze of Racoons which can turn a Congress of Salamanders into a reality.
Canada – where we put the U in labour! National slogans that were rejected.
But you have to give us credit for having an over-sized rodent with a sexually connotative name for a national animal. I have always been partial to a Murder of Crows, having frequently wanted to murder crows. And a Pride of Lions just makes sense. I would be proud to be a lion too. But it turns out the reason male lions are known for the length (in time) of their sexual congress, is because many species practice “sperm blocking”, i.e. trying to ensure that the wee bairns are your own by keeping your slut occupied long enough that she doesn’t invite in the whole neighboUrhood, and lions take it particularly seriously. Which is weird because male lions also eat their young, so maybe they just prefer apples that haven’t fallen far from the tree. “Aw, he tastes just like dad.”