Quoth the Raven, "Gigolo!"

This snippet of mimicry was written in response to a waking inspiration to relate all things natural and mundane to the course and status of my life.  It started as an internal chuckle, and took off from there.  It has also been posted at http://dellasumbrella.newsvine.com/, my blog site dedicated to posts and articles about ovarian cancer.

Quoth the Raven, “Gigolo!”                                       By Wendy Wallin

On a morning gray and teary, as I wondered, blank and bleary,

What the raven, winging past my open window, saw below,

His resounding voice kept tapping out a clicking chant, wings flapping,

That seemed to be recapping not the "Nevermore!" portrayed by Poe--

Oft repeated by the rhythmic, rhyming Edgar Allen Poe

In his redundant tale of woe.

It was clear, while I was listening as the morning dew lay glistening

On the oak leaves, reminiscing on a verdant long ago,

That the word the bird was uttering 'neath the rain clouds barely sputtering,

Was a taunt--what he was muttering was an insult, "Gigolo".

What's a girl to think, on waking, to be called a gigolo--

The male equivalent of "Ho'"?

Whereas Poe thought he was tapping into some mysterious yapping

That might illustrate the texture of a truth no one could know,

What I heard was not a language spouting existential anguish,

But some baggage this strange corvid had decided to bestow,

So carelessly and randomly determined to bestow,

On the nearest sleeping so and so.

Fully wakened now I ponder, as I hear the taunt from yonder,

The unfortunate reminder of a lifetime spent in tow.

In recriminating tones, the fleeing raven made no bones

About eliciting my moans of scant success I have to show--

After years of pledging action to create enough to show--

When he scolded, "Gigolo!"

Ravens, thought to be quite smart, have also crafted quite an art

Of fooling people into noting all they opted to forego,

As if in scrutiny lay atonement for a lifetime of postponement,

When it's stone-cold dumb to rue what started years and years ago--

What could only be remediated many moons ago,

As one’s dull routine eclipsed one’s glow.

Is it theory of mind that makes the raven so unkind

And so disinclined to clarify the seeds he wants to sow?

Does he know that ambiguity results in ingenuity,

Suggesting incongruity to a mind that wants to know--

That has frittered away a lifetime endeavoring to know--

 How to catch but not to throw?

To Poe, the raven spoke of loss in terms that made him feel quite cross,

Engendering rage, exhaustion and the urge to holler "Whoa!"

But to me the bird implied my androgynistic side,

Allowing me to slide into a more agentic flow,

By hinting that I chose my life of regulated flow,

As he gently chided, "Gigolo".

Matters of the Heart or The Heart of the Matter?

Many years ago, my father wrote that it's a little-known but indisputable fact that EARTH is a cyclical permutation of HEART.  Little known, yes: when I Googled "earth is a cyclical permutation of heart", there were no hits. When I left out the word "cyclical" the search yielded about two hits.  One was from the website of a Christian college, in a piece about the mystery of motherhood, the other a poem written just last year.  The poem , "Permutations of the Earth", is a pleasing plethora of permutations tumbling from the words "Earth" and "Terra", a babble evoking flora and fauna and erratic motion, a stream of consciousness pooling at "The Earth, a hearth: Heat at her heart....", a wordfest fading in  flecks of foam at its eddying end. The poem resides at www.poempigeon.com/poem.php?uid=5311.

In my description of the poem, I resorted to alliteration, because as simple as permutations appear, they are not.  Take the game Boggle, for example.  How many words can you make out of three random letters?  Sounds easy.  Looked easy, watching my brother play with other family members.  Once I sat down to play, I realized how it got its name.

Where am I going with this?  I've been doing crossword puzzles lately, initially to pass the time while recovering from hip replacement surgery.  But it's become somewhat addictive, this word play thing, and I'm beginning to understand my mother's preoccupation with games such as crossword puzzles, anagrams, anacrostics, and Scrabble.  But then she was much better at those games than I ever was.

I've never seemed to have the patience for crossword puzzles, and it didn't take more than fifteen minutes or so of playing Scrabble with my mother and brother for me to get discouraged, start drawing blanks (and I don't mean blank Scrabble tiles) and ask to be excused.  Or more accurately, I'd grumble something about needing to run to the store for another six-pack of beer.

That was in the far distant past, of course.  I haven't played Scrabble with my family or made a beer run for well over 30 years.  And I think my brain stamina has improved over those 30+ years of not making beer runs.  I suppose I can partly credit the ongoing practice of listening to clients, registering what they say, and formulating responses for my improved attention, and Ritalin, I won't deny, has significantly improved my ability to digest and retain information from what I read as well as what I hear.  But certainly the lack of mental acuity that accompanied excess alcohol consumption was a problem during some of those Scrabble games.  So I've been pleasantly surprised by my new ability to sit in one place long enough to at least get to a stuck point on crossword puzzles.  Better yet, I've finished a few at one sitting.  Never mind that I end up feeling sore in the butt and like I've wasted the better part of a morning.

My recent affinity for crossword puzzles didn't really start with my hip surgery.  Some time before that, while looking through old letters my parents had written to me, I came across two anacrostics my mother had created.  They were long, each spread out on two sheets of paper taped together, from which I had made copies sometime after my mother died.  I cleverly stored the originals in some place which no longer seems such a clever place, since I can't recall where it might be.  One of the copies I found stored with letters was cut off so the first letter of a whole list of words, along with parts of the clues, was missing.  Not that it mattered much, because I had to cheat a lot -- internet, books, Thesaurus, etc. -- to complete the two puzzles.  But complete them I did, and while doing them, cheating or not, I felt like I was finally giving my mother her due.  Because when she first showed them to me more than three decades ago, I didn't have enough faith in my abilities (and also didn't have the benefit of the internet) to ensure I might actually be able to solve them.  "You're amazing, Mom!" was the best I could do at the time.  I couldn't fathom her facility with the written word, her ability to form complex words from scrambled letters, her knowledge of Latin, Sanskrit, and all manner of literature, the innate poetry of her being.

Here's a sample clue (all of which were hand-written in her very own pica-sized, upper-case print) for one of the words or phrases the letters of which would be inserted into the anacrostic quotation:

"Anc. Greek spring festival at Delphi, honoring Apollo"

And another:

"'The trumpet of a prophecy, O wind,____'(8 wds)"

There were, of course, some easier ones, synonyms, which were nevertheless not always easy for me, such as  "Spread out, dispersed" and "Unduly demonstrative".  But between my figuring a few out on my own and looking up many more, I was able to fill in the quotes.  And then, because they were quotes my mother had chosen, I wanted to honor her by going to the internet to find out who she might have wanted to honor.  It was quite satisfying, making this connection with my mother, so many years after her death, by solving (or at least filling in after Google, Thesaurus, and my mother's old books of poetry had solved) her puzzles.

And now a new thrill, having just looked up "anacrostic" (because I wasn't sure what the puzzles my mother had created were even called), to learn that the first letter of the answer to each clue, when read down the page, is supposed to identify the quote and its author.  I hadn't known that.  I ran to my desk and pulled my mother's completed puzzles out of my "in box", where I store things I might want to refer to on occasion.  Sure enough, the puzzle which doesn't have the first letters cut off by the copier reads, down the page, "George Eliot, Middlemarch."  Holy alphabet soup, she did it all!

It's a little harder to read the anagram on the copy which has all the first letters cut off, although I did try to write them in at the edge.  What I come up with is OM_SHHUXLEYONA_IECEOFCHALK.  Evidently the first clue was cut off as well.  The answer is, it seems, "Thomas H. Huxley, On a Piece of Chalk".

 I don't know how long my new fascination with word puzzles will last, but maybe next time I visit my brother I'll be willing to try my mind at boggle again.  In the meantime, that anagram my father wrote?  An indisputable step up from the pedestrian pet dust I'm scattering here.

This is my mother and brother's birthday, so happy birthday to both.

Empty Corral

My friend Kelly said we have empty corral syndrome.  It’s true; we have had horses in our lives for at least a generation.  Marc and I counted the years and found we’ve had one or two horses for almost three decades, and most of that time with the horse(s) living at home.  Rose was like our last horse child to leave.

No wonder we keep looking up at the corral to see what she's doing.

I bought Megan in 1987, and have not been without horses since.  Add to that time the two years my African stallion, Haro, lived in my back yard, the years I lived at home with my sister’s horse, Goldie, and the three years I had my first horse, Whiskey, that comes to about a couple of years short of half my life that I’ve had a horse to care for.  Marc, as it turns out, has spent half his life nurturing horses as well.

No wonder we keep feeling like a part of us is missing.

A few years after I sold my first horse (or rather, regretfully, traded her for a Mexican saddle), I had recurring dreams that I was back at our first house in the San Fernando Valley, and Whiskey was there and I had forgotten to feed her all those years.  That dream repeated itself periodically until mid-adulthood, when I bought Megan.  In recent years I have have frequent dreams about Dante—riding him, trying to get him to comply, grooming him, responding to his requests that I scratch his sweet spots, watching him and his mare (Megan, Jessie, Rose, in that order) charge up and down the hills, out the gate into the street, through a neighboring ranch, while Marc and I trudge along deer trails, try to outsmart them, head them off and bring them back to the corral....

Or me catching Dante at the top, climbing up onto his back, and letting him find his way back down, helter-skelter, with me just hanging on and enjoying the ride....Or me riding Dante to a training facility and walking him around the arena, glowing with satisfaction when he moves easily into a trot, then canter, then changes leads, then stops on a dime and backs up with a light squeeze of legs and a hint of tension on the reins.   

For the most part, those events were only in my dreams.

Rose loved to roll, jump up, buck, and gallop off, especially when she was outside the confines of the corral.  But from time to time for the last year or so, she appeared to be narcoleptic, and we never knew for sure if she had just rolled or fallen down.  Sometimes she'd be standing, nodding off to sleep, and her forelegs would start to buckle, as Dante’s had done when he was younger. Usually she’d snap awake, head up and ears erect, then start nodding again.  Occasionally she ended up on her knees and lurched heavily as she righted herself.  A few times, she lay down and got herself in an awkward position with her head downhill or her legs under the fence rail, and needed some help getting turned around so she could get back up.  But otherwise she seemed healthy—a vital horse in her late 20s who loved to kick up her heels and tear up the hills when she got the chance.

A couple of days ago, seemingly out of the blue, Rose was having a problem getting up after lying down, and we kept finding her on the ground.  Earlier, Marc had seen her get up from rolling, give a little kick and run around the corral, as if excited about some unexpected sound or scent; then she was down again.  We got her up and took her for a walk; she seemed fine, and appeared to enjoy the outing.  When I went up to give her an afternoon treat of specially formulated feed for older horses, along with carrots and apples--a wedge of which contained her daily arthritis medicine--she was lying near the gate with her head pointing downhill, trembling. After we helped her up using the lead rope she continued trembling, then had a bloody stool, then began sweating as we walked her down the hill to wait for the vet.  Her ears were limp and splayed out; she heaved a sigh and let out a grunt from time to time; she walked slowly, catching herself a couple of times when she started to keel over.  Her eyes looked veiled, vacant; she was clearly in pain.  We covered her with a horse blanket and let her stand or walk, as she wished.  She finally stopped shivering but was soaking wet; she stopped wanting to walk.  By the time the vet got here, her gaze was calm and she seemed resigned.  He took her temperature, which was flaming, and measured her heart rate, which was soaring.  She was beyond help, he said, probably septic; he thought it best to euthanize her.

   

I don’t know what dreams I’ll have about Rose.  We had only had her about five years, and at first she was just a companion horse for Dante (as well as a good ride and a docile and beautiful presence).  But in the four months since we lost Dante, we’ve appreciated her even more for her steadfast reliability, her serene personality, and her stoic patience which probably gave her strength through her ordeal at the end.

Marc and I are both grieving.  It was sad losing Dante, but in some ways a relief because he had so many leg problems and was in pain most of the time. With Rose, we were finally having fun with her without the distraction of Dante’s needs, giving her more attention, taking her for walks around the property like a dog on a leash.  She was also the best horse in terms of disposition and training I’ve ever had the pleasure and honor to own. It’s also probably the end of our horse era.  

And in the Year of the Horse, no less.