Thursday, November 29, 2007

Corvids


(Puzzle piece number 3 of 38.)
Have you ever thought that something was other than it really is?

Like taking a sip of your friend’s water at a fraternity party, only to spew it out because it’s really vodka? Or reaching down to pick up a quarter, when it’s really a punched-out piece of metal? Or scratching yourself when you think you’re all alone? (More about the camera in the corner and that topic later.)

The other morning, my daughter and I were slowly driving south near her high school when we saw a murder of crows gathering. (Who makes up the names of animal groups, anyway? At least a skulk of foxes and a crash of rhinos make sense!) As most know, corvids often gather because road kill is in sight. You can just hear them talking.

“Hey, Mel,” one crow says to his buddy in a New England accent. “Looky over there. Lunch.”

And Mel cranes his head in the direction where Harry is gazing and replies, “Great! I haven’t eaten good carrion since that skunk last week. Man, my eyes are still burnin’. Let’s gather the group and grab a bite.” So Mel, Harry, and the rest of their horde fly over to check it out.

They’d gathered on the east side of the road and were starting to fly over the dark elliptical shape on the west side of the road when they saw us driving toward it. I sorrowfully said to my daughter, “Aw, how sad. Some animal must have gotten hit.”

Typically in our neighborhood, it’s deer that have the highest fatality or injury rate, but today the target was more the size and color of a cat. As we drove closer, one of the feathered cleanup crew members swooped near us, as if to say, “Don’t run over my lunch!” But my daughter looked down and said, “It’s a muddy, rolled-up sweatshirt.”

We came apart laughing, now imagining what the corvids were saying to each other after trying to take a bite.

“Blech! Ew! What is this?” Harry says in his Bostonian tone. “Who played this dirty trick on us? Here I had my appetite soarin’, and what do I get? A chunk of cloth one of those big, featherless things wears. That’s it! I’m aiming at some windshields.” And off Harry flies with the rest of his parcel. And here parcel means a “group of…animals.”

So next time you think you’re taking a sip of beer, smell it first. It may not be what you expected.

copyright © 2007 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2007/11/corvids.html

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Gold Flush


(Puzzle piece number 2 of 38.)
When I was three years old, Mom decided I should have a pet. The decision was a challenge for her because she had to make up her mind, which was a challenge in itself. She actually had to choose what she would have to take care of. It couldn’t require much upkeep because she worked full time, so Mom settled on a goldfish.

Soon we ventured to Woolworth’s and purchased a single goldfish and a conventional glass fishbowl that we dressed with colored bottom rocks and a ceramic protrusion. Studies have proven that goldfish vary the monotony of swimming clockwise in their bowls by swimming upward, downward, and counterclockwise, so they can view their bottom matter from different perspectives, just as men do with women.

We placed the goldfish bowl on top of our Magnavox black-and-white TV-phonograph console, so when Walter Cronkite wasn’t holding my attention, I could enjoy ocular engagement with the fish. Plus the fish was in color!

The thing about fish is that they’re not able to jump out and fetch a ball, or scamper after a piece of yarn, or perch on your shoulder and poop. Confined fish may be great for meditation, but for a three-year-old full of energy, having a pet fish was as much fun as watching croquet, without the benefit of spirits.

Before long, the fish’s caregiver got tired of giving care. Mom’s low tolerance for the slow and high frustration level for tedium led to a negative future for her charge. One morning as Dad stumbled to the bathroom bowl and flipped up the seat, he yelped! Before my dad’s eyes, enjoying his morning laps in his brand new bowl was the sweet, little goldfish.

A bubbling, malodorous minute later, the poor, golder fish was flushed.

The moral of the story is: consider the consequences of accommodating even the cutest or cuddliest of critters, because caring for them may create crimps in your crazy continuance.

And be kind to goldfish: they may jump up and nip you.

copyright © 2007 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2007/11/gold-flush.html

Monday, November 19, 2007

Unearthed


(Puzzle piece number 1 of 38.)
It all began with a disciplinarian German father and a flamboyant French mother. Born on opposite sides of the track in the post-Depression years, these two had nothing in common. Yet looks and chemistry trumped sensibility, and Mom and Dad got married.

Nine months after “I do,” out I came, into the hands of a couple who stood a better chance of growing mangoes in a desert than raising a child. Fortunately, Nana, my mom’s mom, an oasis of love, lived downstairs.

Hoping I’d be a down-to-earth kind of gal, they named me Eartha. Plus a name like Terra Firma wouldn’t become popular until Frank Zappa came around.

Mom was a neat freak and things just had to be just perfect—pictures perfectly hung, dinner table perfectly set, day-of-the-week undies worn on the right day. And being a fashion filly and model, she and I often wore matching outfits—we’d be sailors one day, pirates the next.

My first recollection goes back to when I was 18 months old. Mom was ironing ten feet away in the dining room of our upstairs apartment, while I rocked in our big, scratchy brown chair that felt like a bear with a crew cut. Mom must have given me a Q-tip to, perhaps, clean my ears? or maybe to start me cleaning the house in a small way at an early age, because I held a cotton swab in my little hand. Well, I pushed that Q-tip too far into my ear and screamed! Mom ran over and pulled out the stick before it became embedded in my brain.

But perhaps it was too late. I was affected to such an extent that I still clean the cerumen out of my kid's ears.

I don’t remember much for another year after the tip touched my brain, just that my parents should have taken up fencing, not parenthood. And that life is not perfect, nor neat. Freaky.

copyright © 2007 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2007/11/unearthed.html