Fantastic Mr. Fox, and, a Saturday excursion

Fantastic Mr. Fox

and a Saturday excursion

Fox hunting became illegal here in the UK in 2005.  Fantastic Mr. Fox is so out-of-the-closet now that he made his film début four years on.  Relatives have even moved into the heart of the capital. 

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So, I am minding my business early Saturday afternoon.  Max and I are on Jesus Green, the park that hugs the River Cam.  It's a space made for lazy days notwithstanding the grass tennis-courts, the skate-park and band-shell.  It's a perfect day.  The sky is blue.  The sun, bright.  And, the grass beneath our feet is so verdant, it looks as if it might have been painted.

Max is old now.  He leaves his ball and flying squirrel toy at home.  These were made to make him run; but, running now leaves him winded.  Instead, he prefers simple and several rolls on the green.  Legs flying, as though he's trying to dance on the clouds.  It's behaviour that he began in a bid to prolong his walks.  Today, he's using it to entertain.  Tourists have their cameras pointed at him.

We're at the mid-point of a city-walkie.  Cambridge sits like a ball against the sinews of the River.  A city-walkie follows the curve of the ball, passing through every green space available to us. 

It begins at the far edge of Midsummer Common.  This is the wild where a small herd of beef cattle manage the land, where old-fashioned one-ring circuses pitch tents, one after another, all summer long.  It's where old Guy Fawkes will burn in effigy come the Fall.  Max likes the scent of the beasts.  There's neither a bull nor a circus colt to which he doesn't believe he is related.

The mid-point, backing Jesus College, is Jesus Green.  Beyond us, city-walkies continue between the river's lower and upper locks.  At points, we will literally walk on water to enter the city.  Max loves this part of the walk as in the city lay the remains of the party scene: spilled chips & vomit.  From there, it's over the only public foot-bridge on this side of the city, up the college backs and into Coe Fen.  The Backs bear the last signs of segregation in Cambridge.  "No dogs." they read.  Pity, as here lay the bridges that cross the river, should we need to cut a city-walkie short.  The Fen is a semi-arid wetland where the attraction for Max is another half-flink of cattle.  Coe is the old English word for cow. 

Back in the middle, Jesus Green begins just beyond the cattle guards beneath the Victoria Avenue bridge.  This marks the spot where the last of great College boat-houses rests along the opposite shore.  It's the last safe spot for Max to drink from the River.  Embankments further along grow steep.  A misplaced paw would see him tumble down, armadillo like, into the water.  He has done this once, already.

I am old, too.  The cold snap means that my knee freezes, locks-up as if I'm wearing metal-plate armour that's been left in the rain.  "Pour l'amour d'armure!"  I curse it.  Even bending down to unleash Max brings a complaint from the knee.  It pops with the sound of burst balloon. 

There's a bench not far from where Max teases the air with his up-turned legs.  "He won't bolt", I tell myself, taking a seat.  It's no time before Max is off on his own, nosing the base of trees near the city-side fence.  His graffiti 'I was here', penned in the invisible ink of pee, is marked as an invitation.  It's no surprise, then, that we were soon after surrounded: Otters — Bears — Bear cubs — and, Foxes.

Don't take this literally.  It's a rather largish crowd of gay men, half of them shirtless.  It is typical of the British spirit that, as long as the sun is shining, England might as well be Ibiza or Miami.  Despite the autumnal chill, it's weather made to go shirtless, with shorts and bare feet.  Blankets are thrown down.  Feasts are laid.  The bears and bear cubs have dropped themselves onto the pitch.  Pouring Champaign.  Devouring canapés.  The otters have gone off to play with the foxes.

I'm not much for bears and their cubs.  It's the weight, not the hair.  The otters are cute in a bony sort of way.  None of these men are foxy.  But, the foxes do have an unmistakeable animal attraction.  They're dressed in Fantastic Mr. Fox costumes, complete with paws and tails.  "The Fursuiters are out for fun!" I hear one of them yell.  Then, all of them run.  It's pandemonium.  Max takes notice.  I don't realize how flawlessly he fits in, until an otter howls, "Fox hunt!" and drops to his knees, pulling nerf™ guns from his picnic basket.  Suddenly, all of the otters have nerf™ guns.  And, nerf™ bullets are flying.

I'll leave you there.  Max and I moved on.  I was afraid that he was becoming a bit too animated.  I would have loved to have seen how this ended, ... when the bears and bear cubs finished ransacking their picnic baskets.  You might like to imagine that they'd fall back, belly up onto their blankets, sated.  I, instead, imagined them still hungry, turning on the foxes and devouring the otters.  "Hmm. Tastes like Chicken!" I can hear one of them saying. 

The rest of our city walkie was anti-climatic.

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Afterwords.  Irreverent and gay.

Should you not be familiar the imaginarium of gay slang, I introduce you to some of its woodland creatures.

A bear is a large, somewhat rotund hairy man.  Sometimes, when travelling on their own, a bear is easily mistaken for a middle-aged heterosexual man who has simply let himself go; ... which, incidentally is usually the reason he travels on his own.  His cub is a younger version of himself.

Otters are thin, hairy men of any age, though nature often takes its course, turning otters into bears as years wear on.  "Don't make fun of our father's good looks", my mother used to say.  "You'll grow into his skin one day."  She may have been right, but I'll still make fun of his come-over.

Foxes have no place in gay culture.  There are wolves, feral and inclined toward animalistic sexual naturalism.  They come out only after dark, and, are sometimes thought to be myth.  But, there are definitely no foxes.  Hence, the costumes.

Chicken, by the way, belong to the group of people usually defined by British heterosexual slang as Birds, albeit rendered simply 'nubile'.  You-are-what-you-eat has become cliché.  A sacrament less transubstantiation than supplication.  The desire to be transformed never gets old.  Some even pray for it.

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.