MOTHERING SUNDAY IN CAMBRIDGE

or, AN ODE TO BRITISH SUMMER TIME

Angels singing from Eden
Baptist Church — I don't know
about that — though definitely
birds singing outside in Grafton
Street at 5 a.m. where doors down
the young couple who've just moved in
are cooing like doves come first light
—— and later, on bikes, in Jesus' Green,
a mother and daughter singing — as they pass,
I hear my laughter as I read written
in cloud on the backs
of their sky blue coats — the words:
only the birds can sing.

What has a pair of wings and crows

What has a pair of wings and crows?

Four Vignettes

Ladybirds!

A host of ten, including one of the new-to-the-UK Black Harlequin, encountered on the morning City-Walk with Max.  The Black Harlequin is rumoured to be spreading a sexually transmitted disease amongst the native British Ladybirds.  The Harlequin was surrounded by the others.

One tabloid here feels the need to tell its readers that this new ladybird is not a threat to the human population.  Friends in my old Florida home will tell you that almost any ladybird is a threat to me.  Never has one landed on me that did not bite.  But then, everything in Florida will eat you.  Reference the air traveller who tried to eat another a year or two back.

Hey, that is MY name!

Somewhere past the ladybirds in the city centre, Max and I turned onto C R A Z Y.

Max wanted to go to Mid-Summer Common, the big, unruly patch of wild where all of his dog friends play in the morning.  Instead of taking the main path onto the open space, Max took the fenced side-path.  

―  "Max, where are we going?" I asked.

Just then, a young man was passing.  "Yes. What was that?" he stopped to ask.

―  "I was just talking to my dog." I replied.  People without pets are often surprised that people with pets talk to them.  "Isn't that right, Max." I continued.

―  "But, Max is my name." He insisted.  This has happened before; so, I thought nothing of it, while failing to take note of his 'but'.  "You can't call him that!"

―  "Call him what?" I asked, puzzled, "Max?"

―  "That is MY name."

―  "Happy to meet you, Max!" I offered, "This is Max too."

―  "Max is not a dog." He was quite insistent now, even agitated.

―  "I didn't mean to ..." I began to apologise, when the young man turned in a huff, and, walked away.

"Fences make good neighbours," I thought, "and, I must be on wrong side of the fence."

God on the Common.

As the young man stepped into the distance, Max crouched for a poo beside the fence.  This was the part of the Common known as Butt Green; a poo here seemed logical.  I pulled a bag from my coat pocket and bent down to pick up the poo.

Suddenly, a set of feet appeared before me on the other side of the fence.

―  "What are you doing?" Demanded a stern voice from above.

I looked up to see the face of God, or, God as frequently depicted in Renaissance paintings, only here protected from the light rain by a nylon hoodie.

―  "I'm picking up the dog's shit." I said. People in Cambridge can be militant about dog shit. Sometimes, I've found, making a little kabuki theatre of it helps.

―  "No you're not!" the voice of God contended.

I lifted myself, suspecting that if I were not to be hit by a bolt of lightning, I might well be hit by one of the two bags that God was holding.

―  "I am indeed." I was irritated.  "Here. Look."  I lifted a bag full of shit into view.  I should have known better than to respond, but life has taught me not to quietly step back into 'my place'.

―  "I know that you're not; ...  and, you know it too!" God on the Common insisted.

―  "Alright, then."  I must have seemed to agree; and, stepped away to deposit the shit-bag in a bin a few feet back.  God followed, albeit on the other side of the fence.

―  "You've been sent to infiltrate my mind.  You should know that I know it; and, I will defend myself."  The shit-bag landed at the bottom of the bin with a dull thud, imitating the sound of distant thunder.

―  "What?"  I was taken aback.  Before me stood a man, reasonably well clothed, if belied by nylon, berating me for an act of aggression neither seen nor intended.

―  "Where are you from?" he demanded.  A question no immigrant in a country seemingly, if slightly mad with anti-immigrant fervour wants to hear.  

―  "You're not even English." he observed.  I've always suspected that the English weren't quite at ease in their union with the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish, but it was unsettling to hear xenophobia use a word other than 'British'.  I was cowed into an uneasy state of quiet.

―  "You're Dutch", he spit, "aren't you.  You don't belong here, ...  trying to infiltrate yourself into the mind of a Psychic.  You should know better."  

I couldn't stop thinking about the irony of being pegged as Dutch.  The Netherlands is one of two countries that has tried to deny me access, suspecting me of entering under false identification.  The other was, a bit more ironically, my birth-country, the USA.

―  "I should have known better", I agreed sincerely.

―  "You're just too blind to see it!" God chided.

He turned away, on the path into the open space of the Common. As he proceeded into the distance, toward Jesus Green, he occasionally stopped. Where he stood, he rounded back on his heels, to see me still dumb-founded on the wrong side of the fence.

"Where he leads, I follow." 

... I say to the street preacher who asks where I will go when I die.   It's a multiple choice question. (A) Heaven. (B) To the dogs. 

There's no doubt about my meaning.  I'm at the end of Max's lead, being dragged back into the heart of the city centre, ... where the Ladybirds await our return.

---

7 January 2017

Reports of the Black Harlequin ladybird began around 17 November 2016.
Lead is British English for an American Leash.

Dog's Day

5:30 a.m. and Max is serenading me with the dog's version of the Beetles' Penny Lane.    — Chippy Lane, he sings, is in my brain and on my mind.  Neither of us is very good with lyrics.   — It's there all the time. The beat is plodding and insistent.    — I can't get it out, oh daddy, he complains, daddy please, can't we go out down to chippy Chippy Lane.  You would think that he was about to die.    — There's a kebab laying there. It's got my name down down ah-a-on Chippy Lane.

At 5:30 a.m. Sunday in the city centre, there are only drunks and taxi-cab drivers demanding prepayment.  On the street corner in front of the Army & Navy store, there's an old man dressed for a Minsk winter, the ears of his ushanka pulled above his head.    — Zah Kay Jah Beh stole my soul, he shouts, and threw eat down upon zah ground.  He crawls into the otherwise lifeless street, where he begins to sweep up the remains of a shattered glass with his bear hands. 

Until I remind myself that it is now 5:45, I think, "This is a bit theatrical" — the old man even sounds like Ian McKellen. — "But, it is effective advertisement for the Army & Navy store."    — Luke at me! he demands.   "It's hard not to," I tell Max who's only intent is to beat the retired greyhound and the street-sweeps to Chippy Lane, three blocks on.    — Looook!" the old man continues to demand as I, myself, am swept along by the four-legged feeding machine's dogged determination.    — See how I am shattered!

At the far end of Chippy Lane, in the Market Square, there's a thin lad — he's probably still there — whining to the middle-aged men setting up their market stalls.    — I lost my French fries, he cries in a flat middle-American accent, and McDonald's is closed.    — Then, instructs one of the men, a Scot, get yee bahk thee-r, lad!  He points, tah Rose Crescent, Chippy Lane's daylight name.    -- Chips are to be had on the floo-r.     — Ah, Chippy Lane! "There's a promise." I tell Max.

Chippy Lane this morning, is a veritable feast. The cornucopia shaped lane is over flowing the remains of split and unwanted unfinished kebabs, burgers, Chicken McNuggets, doner wraps, and yes, chips. Stray dogs might be excused the thought that they'd died and gone to heaven. And, a dog at the end of a lead is only certain of it.      — Max is in the moment. He hunkers down if I urge him along. There's a lot to take in.

   

   

OCCUPIED MONGOLIA

A Chinese student sat across from me in the hospital waiting room. Next to him, a woman with a bag of knitting planted herself. As she settled in, kneedles poking through holes in her knitting, she began to interrogate the Chinese student. 
  
— "Where are you from, dear?" she asked, meaning well. 
  
— "Inner Mongolia." 

Ask the question of a Frenchman, he names a department or region. Of an American or Canadian, the name of a state or province.   As an autonomous region, the naming Inner Mongolia was akin to an American naming Puerto Rico, or, a Briton, the Isle of Man or one of the Channel Islands.   You would be forgiven if you didn't know; and, so the woman pursued the logical line of questioning. 

— "Inner Mongolia? Is that, like, the centre of Mongolia?"

— "No." The Chinese student was gentle. "It is outside of Mongolia!"  

This confused the knitter. The student made a fist with his left hand, and, gently rocked it in the space before them both. 

— "This is Mongolia." he explained. With his right hand, he formed the broad out like of China below. "This is China." He pulled China's hand away, forming a pointer to the space below his fist. "This region is Inner Mongolia." 

He was beaming. The memory of home appeared fresh upon his face.

— "Oh!" said the woman in shock. "It is occupied, like Tibet?" 

Shock looked as if it might have been a tectonic plate.  And, it could be seen sliding from her face onto his.

  

EUROPEAN TIME

5:30 a.m. UK time is 6:30 continental time. But, the 6:30 Stanstead train still leaves at 6:30 UK time.  There was no consoling the German tourist who'd arrived unnecessarily early. The platform attendant tried to explain that the tourist would have to wait an hour or board the 5:30 south, get off at Bishop Storford and cross to the northbound Stanstead. "ACH!" exclaimed the tourist, "You-ur trains never run on time."  — Now, the platform agent had been holding the train for the tourist to make up her mind: would she go or wait. Like clockwork, a voice from the train yelled out, "That is why we want out of fucking Europe." 

#ContinentalDriftIsATheory

---

Floored

Max's 2 a.m. zombie, er, uh, city walkie did not disappoint. Following a fellow who had a rough time staggering from the kebab shop cradling his chips while trying to light a joint. A few steps on, the chips were 'floored'. The young man giggled, finally bringing his lighter to the joint's end. Then a toke brought vomit up against a storefront. 

— Free chips & vomit!  All because neither of us could sleep.

---

Nye
  
This is how the Zombie Apocalypse begins.  — 6 a.m. dog walk.

Alarm goes off at the funeral home.   
Police roll up to investigate. No sign of break in.
Low, rumbling growl can be heard within.
  
  

I Love Cherries

The surgery waiting-room was a virtual morgue.  Lots of old people, sitting silently, looking down at their knees as if willing themselves to rise and walk.  The Lazarus act just won’t GO!  — “I don’t like cherries, mummy!” bursts a young lad standing between his father’s legs.  — “You will one day, son.” says the father quietly, ripe with double entendre that escapes the boy.  His parents blow the age-curve of those of us waiting in what is, fundamentally, a clinic for people with the problems of advancing age.  The boy blows the curve yet again. 

Surgery is simply the British word for doctors’ offices.  This one is more dreary than most.  It’s aging badly too.  The boy’s remark conjures a vision of cherries forming on trees in the cemetery.  Last year’s fruit was juicy and sweet.     — I love cherries. —     The vision is a charming diversion from my purpose here.  I’m in the bowels of the University hospital.  I am meant to be an object lesson for future doctors.  My anaemia can’t be explained.  There’s no evidence of bleeding, neither on my outsides nor on my insides.  Yet, I’ve been bleeding profusely every day for more than a year.  The blood is the colour of dark red cherries.

Waiting, I humour myself with the British pronunciation of die-version.  This might otherwise be the melancholic version of my life’s story in which I die of boredom.  As I spell the word out, D. I. E., my German-speaking ancestors haunt me with their very own pronunciation, dee.  The the word.  As if I require a reminder that this is the definitive version of my life.

A nurse comes to draw my blood.  — “A small prick’” she says.  It’s the shorthand of someone with experience for someone with clear sight of a long needle.  As she becomes crusty with experience, I imagine that she will have dispensed with the nicety of a preface, and will lead simply with “prick”.  As I become crusty with age, I suspect that this will be an apt characterization of my personality.  I am already perturbed at having had to give my ‘details’ often, and, publicly enough for an identity thief to have confirmed them.  I feel my willfulness increasing. — “Maybe, this time,” I tell myself, “I won’t tell them what drugs I’m taking or allergic to.”  I should print cards for my next visit to the hospital.  I am deaf and dumb, it will say and have the implied context of How could you not know this already!

The needle glides in.  I imagine Biblical camels passing through the eyes of needles.  I refuse the flow of blood.  It’s a party trick that I learned, having to suffer through clinical examinations as a child.  I’d been subjected to all sorts of prodding, poking and pricking as doctors sought reasons for my malevolent migraines.  It was an era when children were still thought as likely to be affected by poltergeists as by physical affliction.  — “Doctor, I can’t find a pulse.” exclaimed one nurse.  “I think he’s dead.” she winked.  It was encouragement enough.  I’ve been trying to refuse blood-taking ever since.  Nurses have their own party tricks in response to mine.  — “That’s strange.” they often mime curiosity.  Then, they jig the needle as if it was a rubber tube, and, they were stealing petrol through a siphon.

My doctors regard the body as a globe.  It’s an adequate characterization given the shape of the old men and old women in the waiting room.  The neurologists who tried to understand my migraines — how one half of my tongue fell numb while the other still felt pain — they divided the globe into right and left hemispheres, to match those of my brain.  My present doctors shift their attention to my northern to my southern hemispheres.  Their Amazon, their Congo is my colon. 

I have trouble concentrating on the answers I must give to their questions.  I find myself distracted by medical terminology spoken with a British accent.  I hold onto their pronunciation like a child made to linger over the meaning of the present in one’s hands.  ‘Colon’ is just one of several distractions.  Co-Ion, the British say.  Co-LON, I tease the word out between my lips and teeth.  Co-LON-Don.  I think of the conductor of the morning train announces our passage to LON-Don.  And, I smile, in turn, remembering my best friend in grade-school.  We’d just discovered sex in the form of printed porn left in our forest encampment.  Thereafter, he wanted the role of Long Dong Silver* whenever we played pirates in the woods.  In LON-Don , I ride the Tube, which is the very Co-LON of LON-Don.

I have lost myself in the diversion.  My doctors must be thinking of calling in the neurologist to assess my repetition of the word.  CO-Lon, I shift the accent.  This not only throws the switch on a light in my brain but blows the bulb as well.  Pop!  It’s a moment of discovery.  — “Well, I‘Il be damned!” I can hear myself.  “I do have co-Ions.  Big and small ones.  Intestines.”  One of the doctors has a dumb founded expression.  — “Oh, sorry!” I exclaim, aware that I’m within an explanation of being called away in a white jacket.  “I’m American.  We have coI-ons and inn-test-inns.  We pee you’re-in rather than your-eye-in.  I pause to see if he’s okay.  The explanation is making things worse, especially when I feel compelled to add, “I suppose, you have in-tes-tines here?”  At least the other doctor is laughing nervously.

David says that I have away with doctors.  I make them nervous.  Before we left Florida, I went to my doctor complaining of symptoms of appendicitis.  There, I was left to await the doctor in a small room with a small bench, the doctor’s chair, a narrow bed, and plenty of open floor.  I suppose that he’d never entered a room and found the patient curled up on the floor.  It must have thrown him.  He quickly dismissed my symptoms as arising from General Tso’s chicken.  I would see him twice more with the same symptoms before landing in Britain.  Each time, he’d fidget as though locked in his own skin, with a cannibal caressing the surface, making hairs stand on end.  David reported his experience of the doctor as of a wholly different man, one at ease with both doctor and patient.  British doctors removed my necrotic appendix a little more than a year later.  I was overjoyed with the British National Health Service.

I’ve come to today’s appointment having now learned a new lexicon, not just new pronunciations.  I now dare to visualize wooden Galleons sailing through the Straights of Magellan, the back passage between my Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on the force of the wind.   I find it odd that a people who can speak so di-rect-ly about urine, need to take refuge in metaphors for the opposite hemisphere.   When the doctor comes to review my history, I tell him that Stanley’s already met Livingstone.  Tethered cameras have ventured down my throat and wormed their way into my gullet, while equally invasive cameras have spelunked through my back passage, not once but twice.  They’ve found nothing. Nothing unexpected in the deep, dark continent of me.

But, doctors are a literal tribe who otherwise speak a language devoid of metaphor.   It comes as a shock when they ask me yet again to describe the colour of the blood that I am losing, and, prime me with “Bright cherry red?”  — “Cherries, maybe.” I say, “but deep red cherries.”  Like the child in the waiting room, my response twists the curve.  — “That’s impossible,” they say.  “The kind of blood you describe.  No.  It’s got to be bright red.”  I’m perturbed.  — “Why did you ask?” I demand, “if you’re not going to listen to my answers . . .”  I resolved upon previous dismissals to take an evidence-based approach.  — “I have pictures!” I say triumphantly, “want to see?”  I pull out a kind of photographic colostomy bag.  A photo album labelled “Blood Diary”.  I’m still surprised that they agree to see the images, when I hear the words that will vindicate me.  — “Is that BLACK?!” they say.  I can hear myself gloating, “Yes, I am a medical mystery.”  — “You should be dead” a colleague whose mother is a doctor tells me.  Black means that the blood is oxygen deprived.  On my tombstone, I want these words inscribed: I loved cherries.  Deep red cherries.

---

* Long Dong Silver, the porn star, was actually our age.  For all I now know, my childhood friend may have grown into a career as Long Dong Silver.  But, let's face it, it doesn't take a pubescent boy very much time or forethought to make the short linguistic leap from the pirate, Long John Silver.

LION & HAWK

A businessman walks along the 5:45's platform puffing on an e-cigarette.     — “Mate!” calls the platform attendant, “put your cigarette out.”     — “It’s not a cigarette.” says the businessman plaintively.     — “Doesn’t matter,” responds the attendant.  “Cambridge City ordinance. 2014. Includes e-cigarettes in its banning orders.”     — “Oh, sorry.” the business man affirms.  He has the tone of dog-with-tail-between-its-legs.

While I mentally note the exchange, I continue writing my daily card to MaryJane, my shut-in neighbour.  Yesterday’s dog walk brought me onto what sounded like a North American Indian Council of War.  The Hare Krishna had captured Castle Hill.  There, towering over city centre, chants of Hare. Hare. Hare Krishna. Hare Rama. were literally enchanting.

Now, on the platform, with the businessman turned-tail, the attendant took note of me writing.  People often do.  And, they become self-conscious, concerned that I write about them.  This one, the attendant, is making out that he hasn’t noticed me as he does.  It’s normal behaviour: this pretense of I am not thinking of you; therefore, you do not exist. 

He takes a wide, arching path around me, craning his neck to determine what I’m doing.  I pretend not to notice.  But, as he swings around behind my left shoulder, I turn to stare into his eyes.  He is easy on the eyes, a handsome mid-twenty something.  The look forces a confession from him.     — “Oh, it’s a postcard.” he says without a measure of surprise.     — “Does that matter!” I demand.  “What,” I ask more playfully, “might it have been?”  He holds his distance, like a man who finds himself in the lion’s enclosure at the zoo.     — “I thought you were National Rail.  . . . I mean,” he catches himself, “I thought you were an under-cover security agent.” 

The strain he was under couldn’t have made him more vulnerable.  My inner lion pulsed.     — “And, you’ve come to blow my cover, have you?”  He has no answer.  He backs away, as you might from a lion, believing that slow, measured steps might mesmerize the beast into inaction.  And, I turn my attention back to the card, running off to post it before the train arrives.

------------------------------------------------------------

Pay a man attention, and he can be yours!

------------------------------------------------------------

On return to my stand on the platform, there is the attendant.  He’s watching everyone, having released his inner hawk.  Among his jobs is looking out for would-be jumpers.  Suicide by train is a bit too common.  He is also responsible for ‘releasing’ the train.  Most attendants will release a train and walk on to the next train’s platform.  Now seated inside, I sense that this one might be different.  At the sound of his whistle, a precursor to release, I down my pen, turn to look across the carriage, and stare out the window.  I’ll have a final glimpse of him, to see if his curiosity turns him one last time.

The train pulled slowly forward.  The fluid landscape of the station outside drew the figure of the platform attendant into view.  Arms crossed.  Less than a few inches from the glass.  Staring in at the caged lion, as if he were a falconer’s hawk looking on a kitten.

The National Rail’s inspector turns his attention to the young man in a corner of the carriage.  Conspicuous in his discomfort seated across from a beautiful young woman, the young man pulls at his t-shirt.  Crosses his arms in an attempt to hide a burgeoning tummy.     — “Gerbil,” I think.  “Gerbil. Hawk. Lion.”

  

---

Incidentally, on the 16:14 train home out of London, Kings Cross, I sat opposite a National Rail inspector in the far back corner of the train's first carriage.  In a small black notebook, in which was printed a rail map, he noted conditions within and outside the carriage at various way-points along the line.  When he thought that no one was looking, he unfastened his belt and slid his trouser button from its hole.