Goat Boy, Captured!

I’m listening to a new album of Ottoman court classics.  Closing my eyes, I can see Istanbul, a city that I love.

Meanwhile, outside, the neighbour kid is breaking in his new skateboard.  He’s practising tricks that will allow him to hold his own at the skate park not far away.  The skateboard’s sound, as it grinds down the granite curb, is oddly appropriate accompaniment, notwithstanding the distraction of worry that the boy might break his neck on the pavement below my office window.

Playing on the streets of urban Cambridge can sometimes be a dangerous proposition, even during the quite hours of the working day.  But now, it’s 4:23 p.m.  When his father arrives home, the sun has nearly set.  Drivers are already racing down the street in hopes of finding one of all too few parking spaces for the night.  Drivers, at this and in the hours to come, will be single-minded.  Their desperation will make them more dangerous the darker it gets.

Conversations between father and son usually begin in the father’s native Spanish.  They often communicate instructions.  Presumably, they’re in Spanish as much to save the child face among the friends who usually accompany him on the street, as for the bonds strengthened by a family language.  As a child, I’d often wished that my father would have spoken to me in his parents’ German, to save me the indignity of being seen to bow to his will.  But, on this street, the kid is aware perhaps that Spanish separates him from his English mates.  So, the father’s Spanish is usually interrupted with the son’s pleading, Ah, Dad. Speak English!

This evening, I’m not paying much attention to the conversation.  Living so close to one another, one learns to tune out the conservations of others and to blindly stare past open windows blazing light like a beacon to sailors on the sea.  Besides, my Spanish is rather poor.  By time it registers that it’s an argument I’m hearing in fact, it has gone well beyond Ah, Dad.  The father who has in the past been, by measures, friendly, fatherly, and stern is now audibly angry.  It’s a single word, one that I rarely hear in public, that pins the specimen to the board. . . . cabrón . . . It’s spoken as the verbal equivalent of the slamming of a door, or, the breaking of a dish.  Surely, it’s not meant to be understood by anyone other than the son.  This is the language of family.  Nonetheless, I can’t help overhearing it, or, attempting to understand what it conveys.

Language is, for me, like a mechanical flip-clock with its split-flap display.  It has teeth.  They go Tick. Tick. before the moment of comprehension.Tock.  To understand this word, I have to be refreshed, by words more immediately familiar to me.  Along the way, I will have collected up all of the similar sounding words that I know, whatever the language.  It’s as if I need to see the stepping stones across a stream before I will make the crossing.  It’s caballero to which the dial first spins.  Sir. Mister. Cowboy. in translation.  Caballero is a word that I’ve frequently heard used in the heat of debate.  It seems particularly New World Spanish.  Often, it accuses another of being cavalier if not arrogant.  Cabestrillo next takes its place.  I once heard this word used in an argument between a Colombian and a Venezuelan.  Go hang yourself with an arm-sling! one quipped to the other.  The comment was, certainly, a cavil.  The use of an arm-sling would be rather ill-suited to a hanging.  But, as argumental rhetoric, it was effective, as considerable offence was taken.  Other words from my mental dictionary step forward in mechanical succession.  Cabra = Goat.  And, Cabro = Boy, quickly tick up.  Destinations to which my train of thought has already departed.  I sense that I’m honing in on a precise understanding despite the fact that Goat boy . . . Niño de Cabra lights upon a cultural reference.  Cayetano Muriel, El Niño de Cabra as he was known, was a Spanish flamenco master-singer.  In a sense, this is the model of the kid’s skateboarding practice: to master the sport’s art form.  This is interesting!, I think.  Earlier in the day, the Indian news-ladies, gave me new words.  Gujarati, not Spanish.  Doebo, one said, this, it means “Boy” or “Goat”. Doe-Bo, I repeated.  But, the other interjected, Doe-Bee, it means “Stupid”.  Her timing was perfect.  She must have seen me flashing through yesterday’s lesson: Kew-Tro = Male Dog and Kew-Tree = Female Dog.  I mustn’t accidently call their teenage sister “stupid”.  Internationally, it seems, goat boys can be synonymous with “stupidity”.  When cabrón finally goesTock!, it’s the slur of Caribbean Spanish.  So vile is it that, when used among Domicans and Puerto Ricans, it can’t be put into English print.  I’ve dredged up words from arguments overheard while working or traveling in the Spanish Caribbean, and come to this.  A word that dare not speak its name.  Certainly, in Continental Spanish — the language of this father and son — its use must be less vulgar.

On the street, following its use, the argument goes silent.  No longer is the skateboard grinding down the granite; it — itself — is curbed.  There’s no slamming of the door; its closing is muted.  Here inside my office, the music of the Ottoman court plays on.  I close my eyes; and, as I do, I see the notes transformed to numbers that hang themselves on the grid of a musical scale.  Passerines.  Magpies.  Birds with a beautiful song.  I remind myself that their Spanish name, spoken while spitting, is maricón.

The Weather Report

(Originally published on 16 August 2010 on my now defunct personal blog.)

"It might just rain today."  I've always wanted to say that to someone I've more than casually but less than intimately known since over-hearing it years ago when I was still a young man.  It was spoken by one of two older men in a dusty pick-up park in a small southern Utah town.  If it ever rained there, I'd be a little more than surprised.

"Yep.  It might just rain today.  I think so." the other man nearly repeated.  Yeah, I thought, in Florida, but not likely here.  In Florida, the 3 p.m. beamer lets loose on the heads of the British tourists who've never heard about mad dogs.  It falls as no rain has ever fallen on England, just as a father, lowered to his knees, hand over shoulder of his young son, extols the glories of Empire on the ramparts of an old fort in north Florida.  Both are imagining tall ships in the inlet at Saint Augustine in the moment before Spain traded the whole of Florida to a burgeoning Britannia.  There, rain, like the American belief in Manifest Destiny and American Greatness, is a certainty.

Back in southern Utah, the line is delivered with less certainty, reflecting the probability rather than the certainty of rain, if not the desperation of old men for something to talk about.  It doesn't matter. It is something to be said now.  Overheard, it might even seem normal, if banal, conversation.  It is a means of making contact with the man who has been slowly inching toward the first, marking the ground like a hen scratching earth in search of feed.  I've taken the line too literally.  I don't notice, at first, that this little bare-rock park at the foot of a hiking trail is a pick-up place.  Here, it's about lonely hearts, and, bodies aching like the soil for rain.  Watching these two over the next few minutes is like watching clouds gather overhead.  The promise, of rain.

Here in England, I might just use the line with the quiet fellow who shares our communal garden, who tends its plants religiously.  But, I need to consider his reaction.  He's not a stupid man.  I am as certain of it as I am that he is intensely quiet.  The only sound I've ever heard coming from his flat was the sound track of a porn flick.  The bird gratifies the cock with her vocalizations.  -- Bird and cock, of course, being British slang.  Reminds me of the cock fights I witnessed in smoky Puerto Rican rings, where the winner gets the hen and the looser, well.  The looser might just be the fire roasted wings ordered by the fat man two levels down from me.  It's a different world.  But, it might just be the opening line to a budding friendship.

It might just rain today, I would say.  He might smile back.  This is England after all.  English reserve is renowned as rain on the sunny plains of Spain.  Anyway, Summer is already leaning into Fall.  Rain, though unpredictable by Florida standards, is almost certain.  The quiet man will take it for what it is.  A lead, maybe a leash.  A line fishing for a connection.  But, he is neither dog nor fish.  "Yep", he might say  -- or, the British equivalent of it.  Politely though, not looking away from the plant he's tending.  Trimming the dead blooms to ensure a longer flowering season.  Prolonging summer like childhood memory into adulthood.  The observation, the prediction - really - of rain is a kind of trap that will hook him into conversation.

The other night, as I was walking my dogs, I passed him on the street.  Recognition was a fleeting - now there's a word apt for the English historical experience.  That almost furtive moment of boy first sees girl, or, if you like, of boy first sees boy.  If I say nothing in passing, she'll notice that I've noticed but think me too shy to have asked her to dance.  On the rather desolate streets of urban England near dark, there are no plants to tend.  No comfort zone to retreat into.  As I head toward home, in any case, I notice that he's dressed in man's best bar-man's black.  His clothing, perfect for his unofficial role as observer, as purveyor of potential connections.  If appropriate at his destination, I can imagine him leaning into the light, delivering the line or some such other, as smoothly as bill into a G-string.  It appears he's headed off in the direction of the Lap Dance Club - the name says it all with a frankness more American than British.  With my own vicarious life to seed with visions of alien worlds, I'll want to hear all about it later.  Of course, more than the Lap Dance Club can be found in the direction that he is headed.

The next evening, opportunity has come.  I shorten the line to, Looks like rain!  My dog, Max, is taking an endless pee into the storm drain outside the front of the house.  Max is standing over the drain, letting loose with perfect aim.  His performance draws the attention of passers-by, who generally find it as adorably cute as a cat trained to use the indoor loo.  This toilet has something more exhibitionistic on offer.  Perhaps, it is a good thing no one can read my mind.  Looks like rain! has the nostalgic twitter of my maternal grandmother's rough English.  Looks like a cow come a peein' on the flat rock uv the ruff! she would say of an approaching thunderstorm.  Like the walloping a good thunderstorm could give the green-fields, Max's pee kills all greenery.

Most people, thank God, are just amazed to see my boy using the storm drain.  When I lived in New York City, my roommate would borrow the old neighbour lady's dog, Gretchen, for a walk in the park.  Unabashedly straight, he called the dog his "Babe Magnet".  Max is a kind of magnet.  For example, of the men who stop, I can read from their expressions flashbacks to their own potty training, when their mothers floated targets in the toilet to encourage them to aim.  Most dogs here pee in their private gardens.  Max prefers the storm drain.  No doubt, the percussion of it are as deeply gratifying to him as the sound of water on water.

On this evening, the man who stops is the adjacent neighbour rather than the fellow who shares the communal garden.  This young man is from one of the Steppe countries that most Americans collectively call "The Stans".  His name is Mohammed Omar.  The name makes him sound prematurely old.  He's actually rather much younger, a student at the nearby polytechnic university.  It's Ramadan.  He's on his way to break the day's fast.  Looks like rain! breaks the silence that would normally pass between us.  They say in England that you notice but ignore your neighbour twenty times before you might finally say "Hello".  I don't know that that's so much different from my old neighbourhood back in Florida.  There heat and humidity, or, the distance between homes rather than a national reserve abetted the dysfunction of neighbourliness.

Later, when I am asked, "Who was he?" or "Where's he from?" or "What does he do?" and so on, I find that I've gathered up more information than I thought I could have done.  It seems as though conversation was a spider's web, spun for the purpose of catching the dew.

I used to complain that my parents were capable of only talking about the weather.  I was their alien child.  Destined to live in a far off land.  Back home, in Ohio, this evening as my mother lay dying, I try to call her.  It's her birthday.  A monumental day, marked by the Perseid Meteor Shower, by the Catholic feast of the Assumption.  No one answers.  And, all that's on my mind is the chance of one more rain.

   

   

Une bonne idée, comme un bon fire!

(This was originally published on 05 November 2009, on my now defunct blog.)

[Warning: this may be bawdy - it's from England afterall.]

The Americans gave the English Haloween, the least I can do is give America this reminder of a very British holiday.

Tonight is Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes Day ….
In case you’d forgotten!

We all head over to Midsummer Common at sundown – which is at 4:23 p.m. today.  (… which means I’ll be in the dark before the end of lunch time in Florida or not quite the end of breakfast in Texas.)

We’ll all join hands around a huge, literally flam’n fire.  There’s already what looks like the worlds tallest wooden Christmas tree on the spot where the Circus – Zippos : yes that’s a lighter in the states: they were hot – tent stood just last week.  And, on the pile (a word that means "stately mansion" in the British English of the posh, the well-to-do, or "home-sweet-home" in the British English of the common folk), which is formed from remnants of shipping pallets, there is hung the dried cow-pies (pats in British English) left on the Common by the grazing chocolate cows only just days before Zippos arrived.

And, once our hands are locked, we will all sing Who-Ha Who-Ha – or whatever Who-s hear when they’re not being heard by Horton.

And, then, … then, we will set off bigger-than-Fourth-of-July fireworks to commenorate the Gunpowder Plot that might have blown up a Reformation Parliament if ol’ Guy weren’t caught and, himself, set alight first.   Fawkes told those who stopped him that he was just rolling a kegger into the keep for the Parliamentarians to get high on after a hard-day’s work.  (Days are short here, if you haven’t gathered, in an English Fall and Winter.)  No one bought it.  But, that’s why they don’t serve beer on the Common.  That and, I suppose, they don’t want any drunken Yobs stumbling out of the Common, across Butt Green, an adjacent expanse of pitted lawn, and into the traffic of Maiden’s Causeway, which is a road.

I understand that a local Vicar – that’s a priest who is married – our former neighbour, Roger Williams, may give a benediction.  David just can’t stop marvelling: he came all this way from Road Eye-lan, only to encounter the reincarnation of the State’s founder, erm (that’s how we spell “um” here – same pronunciation … the “r” - when not at the beginning of a word - is like an “h”), Roger Williams.  The name is even pronounced Rog-ah Williams as it is in Providence, RI.  (Yes, Barbara Walters fans, Pwahvidence, Roe d'Eye-lan.)

After the fireworks, we’ll try to clog our various blood vessels with deep-fried fish’n'chips or toad-in-ah-hole (that’s something like a pig-in-a-blanket, only much, much bigger) and either served in a dur-ee news-pay-pah, which they call “dead common” here.   Don’t ask me what "dead common" means.  “I’m dying!” used to be shouted during the act of procreation.  So, maybe they just mean that they weren’t born royalty.  British slang is like that: backward after a fashion.  Say in ain’t so: you don’t say NO you say it’s ON.  (I jest.) … Like your American “bad” meaning like Michael Jackson when he was still alive, or, Phat with its Khmer (oh, Cambodian) spelling.

I understand that chili is a more traditional food for the night – but it kinda won’t stay in the newspaypah.  The Cambridge News doesn’t hold much news as it is.

Anyway, I’m actually looking forward to the candy floss.  It is perhaps the only floss you don’t want between your teeth.  No more said.  No more.  You all call it cotton candy in the States.  Unlike fish and the toad that’ll be wrapped in newspaypah, the floss will be wrapped around newspaypah.  We like recyclin’ ‘e-ah.

We were all told to bring our torches and to watch out for the Yobs.  When they said “torches”, I assume they meant flashlights – British English is so quaint.  But, if a flashlight is torch, what then is torch?  I keep seeing that Frenchman’s painting: Zees ees not a peep, and, envisioning a scene from Frankenstein: the villagers carrying fire at the end of a fag – speaking of quaint, a burning fag is not what it used to be in the American deep south, i.e., not me set on fire; it is, rather, a bundle of sticks – fire wood, in other words.

Nor do I know how a flashlight helps you watch out for the Yobs, unless they really meant a torch.  What, you ask, is a Yob?  You can be forgiven if you think it a troglodyte, arisen from the pages of H.G. Wells 1895 Time Machine.  Like tonight’s fireworks, it is set in England too.  But, those were Morlocks.

The first time I heard the word “troglodytes”, I thought I had heard “frog luddites” - some frogs, you know, do savage themselves away in caves, adverse to the technological progress of home building, as depicted in 19th Century kiddie-lit (in evidence I offer you Caldecott’s 1889 Frog a would a wooing go), or, the wonders of high speed Internet.

No, a Yob – literally boY, spelled backward – is just a social misfit.  Maybe they take their Swift – the writer, not the bird – seriously here in Cambridge.  I’m refering to his treatise of 1729 on eating Irish babies; A Modest Proposal, it was called.  Why should it not be turned on the wayward, hoodie-youth gathering in our parks, on our greens (that's a park, not a salad) and lurking amidst our commons (that's a park too, just more sociable)?  I understand that, like chestnuts, they’re best over an open flame.

You ask me, that’s what happens when you go holding a mirror “up to society”.  The social contract fails you, ev-ery time.  Socialized medicine, indeed.

A swift, by the way – the bird, not the writer – is a troglodyte too.  It gets confusing.  That’s why we have fireworks this evening.  Clears the mind in the same what it clear's the night sky of birds.  Though apparently, it may make getting to work a bit difficult tomorrow morning, what with all of the bonfire smoke laying over the low, rolling East Anglian landscape.

Oh, yeah … now I remember.  When in doubt as to an English word, speak French.  If a British torch is an American flashlight, then an American torch is a British flambeau.   Flambeau: that’s French, for flambeau.

Expect to hear it during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.  “Dame Brindley is now carrying the Olympic flambeau into the stadium.”  Of course, they may duck the issue for the international audience and call it simply, "the Olympic flame".

Forgive me for thinking of Dame Brindley.  1948 was the last time that the Olympics was held here, in London – Austerity Olympics they were called; post-war deprivations and all that rot.  It's austerity England again.  And, with so many librarians being put out to pasture, I imagine Dame Brindley, THE Librarian, would jump at the chance to enlighten a stadium.

Rot, by the way is an example of that other fine tradition in British slang: the Rhyme.  You see it all over children’s books.  No wonder there are Yobs and Lirgs bounding to the assistance of old ladies everywhere as they cry out: I floss me teeth in a glass of wahtah on each an’ every night!  Translation: she looses it when frightened, calls the bobbies ’round, who rolls them Yobs off to a jail cell for the eve-nin.  Rot doesn’t mean rot.  It means lot … as in all that lot.

Anyway, the Olympics previous to 1948 was the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

My mind is just crack’n, I suppose.  ‘36.  Berlin.  Nazi.  Fire.  Book burning. – Librarian’s humour. -  And, voila (that’s English for “sha-zam!” and French for "told you so") … Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library.  I can just picture it, she places the flambeau into the Olympic cauldron, and, racing outward around the stadium’s electronc displays …. pages of books and manuscripts held in British libraries: Magna Carta, Doomsday Book, etc.  And, what could be finer for the Austerity Olympics of 2012.  The Magna Carta, which started it all!  And, the Doomsday Book … it is going to be 2012, after all.

Well, the world’s not going to end this evening – okay, this afternoon.
But, I wish you were here!  It's Bonfire Night!

   

Sky Lantern

When I was ten or so, I discovered the library in my grandmother's house.  Among the volumes, almost hidden, there, there was a set of encyclopaedias, The Book of Knowledge, dating from the 1920s.  Its entries were written as are none of the articles in contemporary encyclopaedias.  They were more narrative than statements of fact.  Many were written to engage rather than to simply inform.  Any given article might require the reader to interact with the narrative, much as does a video game in the hands of a child now.  The order of entries complied with a logic that would be foreign to any encyclopaedia published since the 1940s.  Their order seemed almost random.  They, along with other tomes in her library, and together with her perversely delightful habit of tearing out the last few pages of the novels, were enchanting.

One of the narratives that held my interest was on lift.  Mind you, the aeroplane was still more of a curiosity than useful invention at the time these volumes were published.   This particular article invited the reader to experience lift by building a hot air balloon, which it called a "sky lantern".  My imagination, perhaps because I had never built one, burned as brightly as the tea-light that heated the air inside the lantern to produce lift.

It is late here, as I write.  The dogs and I have just returned from the evening's last walk.  The moon, nearly half full, is still waxing.  The sky remains dark enough to afford full view of the stars in the night sky.  And, it is a lovely night indeed.  It's the good weather and the light of pubs that seem to draw people this weekend night.  As music and crowds spill out onto the street, the mood is intoxicating.  I return feeling as though I've travelled through time, to islands further south in the Caribbean jet stream.  Memories of evenings spent in places in the sun have become enmeshed with being here now.  Perhaps, as dusk settles into the light on the Eastern seaboard of America, or, still burns brightly over the West, it is more appropriate to say that I am sensing timelessness.

This evening, among the stars, there burned a light bright enough though still distant to be taken for a planet.  A sky lantern.   As I puzzled out what it might be, it too was magical.  It's yellow and orange glow signalled as might the lights of a jet bound for Tokyo - lights stilled in space, frozen on a plane that the ancients used to describe as a "crystalline sphere".   Then, it's fainting light seemed a memory of a fuller moon, as its light passed through a cloud of volcanic ash several weeks past.  No sooner had I recognized it as a sky lantern, its light had burnt out - as though knowledge had killed it.  I wondered if the anniversary that it likely was set adrift to celebrate might have ended unfortunately, perhaps even in an untimely death.

For a moment, as we passed beneath a street light, I'd lost sight of the falling craft.  It had been stolen from me.  Then, overhead, it spiralled, circled silently.  If air were water, it might have been a jellyfish above me as I swam through the cloudy confluence of north Florida's Saint Mary's River, where it meets the Atlantic, not far from where the French first attempted to settle the New World.  On closer approach, it seemed a fish taken from the sea, its jaw swung open at an angle, and, its gills simultaneously gasping for and losing breath.  In the dark, transfigured as it was, it was no longer a falling star.

I never imagined it.  The death of a sky lantern.  The article that enchanted me this long had never mentioned either what became of the lantern when the engine of lift had surrendered itself on the night.  There are sky-lights over the bed in the guest room.  I'll sleep there tonight and dream on it.

(originally published on my now defunct blog, 21 May 2010)

Gab o'May

A cold north wind drives toward the English Channel.  May, in retreat, shall soon be declared March, leap-frogging April.  The petals of cherry blossoms that only yesterday, themselves, invaded every doorway with a message of cheer, have taken to the roads leading on to Dover.  While overhead, storm clouds occasionally let fall their brilliant, explosive bombs.

Though not yet rainin' auld wives and pipe staples, the dreich an' the droukit are a new language for the lashings of Spring as the Anglian fens 'come a moor for much as we may desire the glaise o'Summer.

      

English for Americans:

"rainin' auld wives and pipe staples" - Scottish phrase meaning a heavy downpour (auld men, I presume, are a contradiction: heavy but a trickle; they just don't work) -- when the Scots transplanted themselves to North America, they revised the saying somewhat, preferring to say "when a cow comes a pee'n on the flatrock o'the ruff" -- quaint isn't it.

   

"dreich" - Scots English: the wet; dismal conditions -- in the United States, the Scots English becomes "in the drench".

   

"droukit" - Scots English: a drenching; a soaking - probably from old Norse "drkkyr" meaning something closer to "drink" - here as drunken. You can begin to see the connection, yes?

   

"a new language" - Scots English refers to this kind of seasonal weather as the "Gab o'May" -- as if May has a language all its own.

   

"fen" - old English: wetland; a marsh; a bog - before they were tamed, the fens were swamp-like, though a Floridian or coastal South Carolinian or Georgian would have better related to them as a sawgrass marsh.

   

"moor" - old English & Scots English: wetland; a marsh; a bog - and, yes, sadly, the double-entendre of the French "amour" is intended (why pass up a good bilingual pun).

   

"glaise" - Scots English: a warming - probably from the French "glaise" meaning "clay" as in the English "glazing" of clay. Never hurts, when hoping, to be redundant. Well, redundant in the American sense of repetitious -- I dare not put archaic words forever out of employment.

This was originally posted to BUZZ on 3 May 2010.

For the Love of Bull

Have I mentioned that my dog, Max, is overjoyed?  Here in Cambridge, the return of warm weather brings cattle to Midsummer Common?

On our walks there, he pulls me toward the cattle, or, more precisely, the bulls – they’re all, 20 something of them, bulls.  My other dog, Maya, ever fearful of them, pulls me away.  From any distance, our walks across the Common must seem rather comical.

I have to admit that, personally, I have a healthy respect for cattle.  When I was young, my father used to farm me out to a friend who owned a dairy herd in southern Indiana.  There, I was a prized summer hand.  The cattle loved me.

Dairy cattle you may know have to come in at the crack of dawn for a regular milking.  This particular herd was ruled by a matron.  Bossy, she was called for obvious reason, refused to budge toward the milking stables until she felt appropriate respect.  Bossy would move for no one, on no amount of prodding and for no temptation.  But, she would move at the sight of me.  Some people move heaven and earth.  Others part water or walk on it.  Some levitate.  I once had an odd power over a peculiar cow.  Hell-bent, Bossy would come running for me.  She’d usually pin me up against a fence or barn wall and gently – you might say, lovingly - head-butt me.  It was always a pretty frightening experience.  I lived in fear that I’d end up in a shot-gun wedding to a cow.  Once the farmer’s wife realized what was happening that was the end of it.  Mornings there after usually began with yells of “Run, kid. Run.” with Bossy in hot pursuit; the both of us running toward the milkers.

The other day, Max pulled me right through the middle of the herd.  One curious bull took an interest in him.  Before we’d made our way through the herd, Max and the bull were nose to nose.  Max decided that sitting was in order at that very point – probably fearful that a wagging tale might be too encouraging of the bull.  Then, Max did what Max always does when he comes nose to nose with another creature.  He stuck out his tongue and licked.  The bull seemed to be only slightly surprised.  The expression, if bulls can be said to have expressions, seemed to be one of mild amusement followed by curiosity.  For the rest of our walk across the Common, that bull followed us, pursued in turn by his entire herd.  Max seemed both fearful and proud of his adoption into the herd.  I was having flashbacks to Bossy.  Maya, fortunately for all of us, was with David that day, and, lagged behind everyone … including David, who seemed to be dragging her across the Common.

Our most recent foray across the Common portends - augers, even, if this repetition can be said to trend – the coming summer’s fun.  On this walk, Max spied the cattle through the long grass, from the far end of the expanse.  They were lounging beneath the walnut tree that, come Fall, will gather humans straining to pick its fruits before they fall.  It was a mad dash – I should emphasize, mad: crazy, insane - as Max dragged Maya and me across the flats in the direction of cattle with nothing better to do than to watch grass grow.  And, what did my honorary brother of the bulls do, having come to the cattle?  Why, he threw himself down beside one of the bulls, and, refused to be budged for the longest time.  He was in his element.

On the walk home, we had the conversation that every boy and his dog have sooner or later.  You know where your din-din [canned food] comes from, don’t you?  I asked.  He didn’t seem to care.  I’ve long suspected that grains and vegetables replaced meat in those cans.

(originally posted to person [now defunct] blog in 2010)

What Time is It, There?

I have no sense of time. So, it came as no great surprise yesterday that I lost an hour. It had been 3 p.m. (15:00 hrs) when I last looked at the time on my computer. I'd stayed awhile longer to finish a segment of database design. Then, I set it aside to take Max for his late afternoon walk. By the time I had reached the front door, the time on the home alarm was reading 16:15. "Time flies!"

Now, my computer had corrected for British Summer Time (BST). I was certain of it. And, I could be sure that time hadn't had a second government-authorized "Spring forward". I apologized to Max for my preoccupation, my tardiness, leashed him up, grabbed the Flying Squirrel toy, and flew out the door. I thought nothing more of it until today. A few moments ago. Well, a few moments ago, when I began writing.

Max is in his post walk coma. Playing with Flying Squirrel can be tiring. I've noted the time as 16:15. "Deja vu!" It will kill me. Deja vu! I'll have a vision of my death; and, I'll die straight away. I know that the sense of having experienced something before proceeds from the likely fact that I have indeed done some precise thing before. Exactly as I'm doing it now. Whatever it may be. Having no sense of time ... Well, it plays tricks with time. But seeing the digits 16:15 two days in a row was putting the lie to this surety of Deja vu. Time was giving me a before and an after. Max eager to go. And, Max tired from having gone.

Nonetheless, it reminded me of yesterday's puzzle. How could I have lost an hour? It was then I found myself opening the database I'd been working on. I noticed that my backup was a bit old. -- Only 15 minutes, but I'm paranoid ... thanks to the cheeky tricks Microsoft Access had been playing on me before I dumped in to build in MySQL. So, I made a fresh back up. I noted that the time of both my working and backup files was the same. A sense of relief settled up me,

... Until I looked over at the computer's time clock; and, I was unsettled. The computer's clock was running an hour ahead of the time just marked in the file directory. It's odd -- isn't it? -- that the clock should have sprung forward with BST, whilest file directory time remained on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Whereas yesterday's ripple in time took an hour, today's seemed to be giving it back ... at 16:15 precisely!

The paranoid instinct wants to assert that I've probably been hacked. It's had that feeling recently ... though I know it to have been the result of a laser-mouse as it was dying. Before it was retired and replaced, it seemed to be possessed, moving where and doing what it pleased. One of the last things it did was to enter my photo-storage and execute a slide-show. As my life was flashing before its eye, I allowed myself to dispense with paranoid suggestion. Instead, ...

The poetic instinct offers a physics lesson. Ockham's razor, it suggests, is swinging. One hour to the East. Then, one hour to the West. Since my sense of direction, here, is 90 degrees off-cant, that's more likely one to the South and one to the North. As we embark upon British Summer Time, sun rises ever earlier, seemingly extending time. Max, who is my time-piece, threw himself in bed and began his morning "Get-out-of-bed-and-walk-me-now!" ritual when the clock -- the bed-side clock at least -- was reading 5:24 a.m. The sun, brightening the room as though it might have been the 10:24 a.m. of a Winter's day.

"Didn't I just go to bed three hours ago?" I asked him. "Let me sleep a while longer!" I added, pushing him off the bed. We'd stayed up late to catch an episode of The Walking Dead, consigning our last walk of the day to the black hours after the closing credits rolled. England and the dead of night go together like hand-in-glove. And, together, they do Zombie in the Night better than is done on the animated streets of Haiti after dark. (I know, I've walked the darkened night-streets of Port-au-Prince long after the US Embassy there advised would be safe.) England, as the night air warms, gives us the Living Dead, the homeless alcoholics who've missed the closing of the hostel-for-those-on-the-dole doors. They shuffle along aimlessly oblivious to the hour, some singing ditties slurred, sounding like the drowning man pulled to shore, coughing up the breath of fishes. 28 days. 28 hours. 28 minutes. Give me even 28 seconds of forethought later, together with the sounds of the house settling, ... and the fear that just one of them might have been a real Zombie left me long into the night unable to find sleep.

What time is it? Does it matter? If my computer desires to support two distinct but simultaneous frames of time, I don't care. BBC World Service radio does it. At the time of posting, it is 17:42 and 18:42 all together where I am. And, Max is hungry. It's (his) dinner time.