the Village Knittiot

Cackling Thunder
This is the kind of thunder I was most afraid of as a child. I would lay there paralyzed in my bed as it started slowly with a crackling sound in the distance like a fire starting to pick up speed. It is deceptively soft at first but quickly crescendos to an intensity that involves several unpredictable bursts that feel as if they alter your heart’s rhythmic beating. I called it the cackling thunder when I was little because it reminded me of a witches laugh.

Canadian Geese
It is surprising to me how these spectacularly dim-witted, yet graceful creatures hold so many memories for me. The earliest one was a dreary overcast autumn day. Lets see, I must have been in third or fourth grade. My friend Melanie, her small brother Matthew and myself were wandering around the deserted golf course near our apartment complex. This was before they put wire fencing all around to keep out the riffraff. We came across an enormous flock of Canadian Geese resting and feeding on their way south. We slowly waded into the middle of them which made them pretty nervous. Suddenly Melanie, who had a bit of the devil in her, did something to startle them. In one giant movement the whole gaggle of them began to take off. Matthew was stunned and terrified. We watched as he ran around in circles trying to find his way out of the tangle, his hands thrown over his head fearful they would send cascades of goose poop raining down on his head. I don’t think we ever laughed so hard.

Later when I was older, sometime in high school, my mom and I lived near this suburban office park that was in the midst of a natural marshy sort of area. It had many walking paths and secluded walkways that no one really ever seemed to use. I spent many of my sulky teenage years weaving through these paths brooding and smoking and dreaming of my future or bemoaning it. Throughout the spring and summer of one year in particular I watched as the Canadian Geese came, mated and raised their young goslings to maturity. Then one day toward late or middle summer I had this most amazing realization. The dad hadn’t left. There they were, this family I had often seen. Mom, dad and their five or six awkward adolescents. He stuck around and helped raise the babies and even now that they were older, still, there they were. Mom and dad together. Goslings nearly grown, making their way tenuously out of the nest, so to speak. Remarkable. I later learned that Canadian Geese typically mate for life, with recorded pairs having been through up to 42 seasons together. Stunning.

I later heard a story that when Canadian Geese are traveling together if one goes down, he is accompanied by two others who stay with him until the injured one recovers or dies. I don’t know if this is true, or a fabricated fable intended to remind us that survival of the fittest and a cold detachment aren’t the only things that get us through. But I have read about hippos and their mourning rituals, watched a polar bear mother grapple with the death of her young cub and one night driving home I came across an accident and saw a dear crouched in the center of a highway unable to move, her legs broken, and I saw right into her eyes so full of fear. If emotions are physiological or at least have a tangible element, animals feel them too. And their wisdom is just a different wisdom from ours. It isn’t necessarily anthropomorphizing to ascribe thoughts, emotions and behaviors to them. It is just acknowledging the dignity of their existence as well.

Then, of course, there was the time that my mother and I watched in slow motion horror as a Canadian Goose came in too low over the highway for its landing and was clipped by the corner of a speeding car. I have to give my mother so much credit for her willingness to indulge my tenderness toward animals, because it was often pretty tough for her too. The goose sort of hobbled off the side of the road and came to an uneasy rest on the grass. We pulled the car over and tried to approach it and this made it try to run away, which it couldn’t. So we backed immediately off feeling that we were only adding to its suffering. It had a companion with it who, I believe, would have stayed, but our fear and sorrow and meddling ways scared her off. My mother went into a nearby restaurant, some seedy bar, and used the pay phone to call everyone she could think to call while I sat at a respectful distance to the bird just keeping it company, crying a little and telling it everything was going to be okay. My mother called the bird rescue society and they told her if she could bring it in, they could hopefully treat it, rehabilitate it and release it back into the wild, but neither of us had any idea how to get the bird there. She called the police to see if they could help and she was told that an officer could come over and dispose of it, which, of course, sent my mother into a panic. No, don’t do that she said, but I’m pretty sure she knew that they would now have to send someone over to check it out since there had been a call. She imagined the policeman shooting this bird in front of me, in front of her and she started crying in the middle of the bar. The manager unable to remain oblivious to my pretty mother crying in his bar, came over and asked if he could help. He grabbed his line cook and the guy who washed dishes and a big cardboard box. The four of them striding across the lawn towards me looked like a scene from a movie. The manager and his two men quickly managed to herd the goose into the box and safely secure it in the car so we could drive it out to the rescue facilities. Ah, the kindness of strangers. As we were pulling out of the parking lot with the goose, we saw a policeman pull up and my mother and I breathed a sigh of relief. Just in time. When we got to the rescue place, they took the bird in back to examine it. We waited. Probably, we should have left. A few minutes later they came out to tell us that its back was broken. There was nothing they could do, but at least it didn’t have to suffer unduly. And then they sat there with us while we cried. I was in tenth grade, I think. The line cook was a schoolmate, but we never talked about it. I don’t know why.

Also, on a lighter note, I do a great imitation of a honking flock of Canadian Geese getting nervous and then taking off. Someday, if we ever meet in person and I’m not feeling too shy, ask me and I promise I will do it for you. I also do a great pug impression, but that is another story and a whole other letter…

Cat Log
Our neighborhood has its fair share of cats. For most of my life I have been extremely allergic to cats — and I mean wheezing, eyes swollen shut, take me to the hospital I can’t breathe allergic — I have steeled myself against their feline charms and professed often and loudly to hate them. This, of course, serves only to make them exceedingly and wickedly fond of me. But over time, my allergies have gotten better — or at the very least I can tolerate most cats without feeling as if I am dying — and I have begun to find them as wonderfully intriguing as other people do.

My office at home overlooks the neighbors yard, and throughout the course of one spring I noticed that the local cats tend to use her yard as their main thoroughfare. Practically every time I looked up from my computer screen, there one would be. So, I started keeping a Cat Log noting which cats I saw at which times, what direction they were crossing the lawn and at what pace. Typical entries went something like this:

8/23/04 8:52 p.m. Orange and white cat crossing left, leisurely pace

8/24/04 6:37 a.m. Orange kitty (not the orange and white one) crossing left at full speed

8/25/04 3:18 p.m. Corvus can see the Professor Kitty from his office. The other kitties must be unsure of him, they are keeping their distance and pacing but not crossing

And so forth…

Chickens!
My favorite bookstore is in Minneapolis. Truthfully, The Wild Rumpus isn’t just any bookstore. It is like an amazing universe where you can become a child again just by stepping through the small front door. It is still one of my most favorite places in the world and one of the things that makes me want to live in Minneapolis on those days when I forget what it would be like to live in the Midwest so far from the ocean and general bluntness of the northeast. The place is full of books and animals — a knittiot’s playground in other words — and I lived for the feeling of being there.

One of the animals was a free roaming chicken named Dali (after the Dali Lama). I loved him and I became resolved to someday own a chicken that I would permit to wander around my house. Then they got Elvis, a fancy chicken along the lines of this:

and I decided I would actually need two chickens. Soon this dream turned into wanting a flock of chickens. This book only fanned the flames of my madness. What can I say?

Church (also, Christianity)
In my search for a father figure to fill the absent space left by my own quickly retreating one, I went through a relatively brief, meaningful and ultimately life changing foray into the Christian Church. I was, once upon a time, if you can believe it, a Sunday School Teacher to children who were at the time four and five years old, but who I hear from my mother are now getting ready to graduate from high-school. I attended an extremely conservative Christian college which my friend Melissa and I concluded we needed just so I could discover that I wasn’t a Christian and she could realize that she was a lesbian. For a time I was a theology major. I have taken Greek. I used to translate passages, write heady papers on doctrine and had major partings of ways with more than a few students and some professors who felt at best I was an atheist and at worst, a heretic. Heretic is a definition I will now heartily embrace thanks to a couple of dear friends of my husband who informed me of their game where the heretic is the one who always points out logical fallacies or otherwise uses their brain.

Cockatiel
My most favored pet is a cockatiel. I named her Madeline nearly 15 years ago and call her Maddy for short. She still lives with my mom in Minnesota. She handles change about as well as I do. Neurotic owner, neurotic pet. When distressed she plucks the feathers out of her back. This is a disturbing habit, but she has gotten a lot better over the last several years. When I call my mom, she holds the phone out to the bird so she and I can chat. She can always tell when its me on the line and she will climb down out of her cage, walk over to my mom, climb up to her shoulder and start tapping on the phone with her beak. I love my bird. Also, when I come home for a visit, she always ignores me pointedly for the first day just to make sure I know how displeased she is with me for moving out and not ever visiting.

Cooking
In my mind, cooking has always felt like magic. A friend of Mr. Knittiot said something to the effect of cooking being the oldest magic and asked why we should be surprised that we feel undernourished and ill so much of the time, when we have entrusted that magic to fast food joints and convenience solutions. I feel it is very important for people to understand that they have a philosophy of food, even if they are unaware of what it is or they have just swallowed the definitions that have been handed to them. Food, as we all have experienced is one of the most important elements of a social gathering, a family and the very life we live. Eating, cooking and consuming consciously is a spiritual pursuit and filled with magic.

Cryer (not Jon)
I am a cryer. A serious cryer. If we lived in a culture where there were professional mourners, I would have my vocation. I cry at everything. I cry when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I’m scared. Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry. When I am angry or frustrated, I cry. I hope this is one of those things that is endearing about me and not utterly annoying. When I was younger my mom told me that I “cried pretty.” I thought that was odd. I think I look ridiculous because my mouth turns down and my face gets all distorted. I think she probably meant when I am not hysterical. You know, when you just sit there and the tears slide down your face.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 11:06 am and is filed under this Random Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.