I've never bought a balloon from a little lame-footed balloon man even when he's whistled far and wee. I've never stood underneath a large tree and admired its bark. I've never soaked a sock in the kitchen sink. I've never washed a dog in the nude. I've never communed with a shrub.
Once, when I was younger (I'm not so sure when that was but it was a while ago), I tried clasping my hands in ecstacy over some weeds in the backyard, but the weeds were just weeds. I thought once about running out into the street and yelling "Tutti Frutti, Tutti Frutti," but the dogs started barking and threatened to call the police.
Sometimes, I think it would be swell to get to know a duck or a squirrel or a furry creature, and I've thought more than once that I would like to know something about ants. Somehow I've never found an ant who would give me the time of day and the only duck I ever knew was a large white one we got the year after I got this cat named Dukky for Easter.
The duck was all right I suppose but it belched and drank in secret and left green goo on the sidewalk near the back door.My father was going to eat it, but he didn't know how to kill it. (He was always better at abstract problems like computing the value of a moose or figuring out how much he would make if he could sell one of the inventions he stored in the cardboard box next to the dresser.) My father thought maybe he could run over this duck with the Packard. "Slip the brake," he said, "and let it roll backward down the drive and I'll chase it from behind." When that didn't work, he tried throwing marshmallows at it hoping it would choke to death and when that didn't work, he chased it with a stick until it promised to leave town without any luggage.
I suppose my father was more or less a roadkill gourmet, anyway. My mother used to tell me that he used to eat roadkill varmints and once even skinned a flattened porcupine to get at its hind legs. I don't know about that, but I remember every so often his eyes tracking tufts of rabbit fur along the roads in Utah.
Nowadays, I've given up on ducks and lizards and field mice and pigeons.
I've never tried to handle a roadkill opossum or a deer or even magpie--
although I make jokes about them once in a while and try to teach my
students to admire more in them than I've been able to find out from
twenty feet away. Here's a poem I once wrote:
Roadkill Possum
Feet not so fleet and hair upturned
Sir possum fat with stupid grin
Launches haunches into traffic . . .
Tires roll his body thin.
Feet not so fleet and hair upturned
Sir possum flat with sidelong grin
Feeds the road mice after darkness . . .
Who now enjoy the shape he's in.
I cook dead farm ducks occasionally on New Year's, but mostly, I leave the
ducks alone except when they come over late at night to make quiet faces in
the mirror and go chuffa chuffa in the shower Saturday mornings.
I have an irrational, messy fondness for gentian violet. I don't know where I would get the stuff, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to bring it in the house--but if I could, I know I could save us hundreds of dollars.
My faith goes back to the sixties when we lived on Ivanhoe Street. I had this corner room with a window that opened up over the front porch roof and I had this cat named Ducky who used to climb up the trumpet vine at about three in the morning and bust his way onto my face. For a while, I had a screen over the window, but Ducky busted out a corner of the screen and after a while, with a clear jump, he could duck right in and land on my face.
I don't know why I liked that cat. I suppose because he could climb the trumpet vine. But he was also a rather stupid, glandular animal who lost a lot of fights. One time he tried to bust onto my face and missed because something bigger or tougher had ripped about five inches of hair out of his rear end and he wasn't very happy. And there was a stretch of several weeks where he had this sore on his neck that bloated with pus and opened up periodically in some tissue explosion. And there was the time he almost lost an ear, and the time his teeth came loose and his jaw didn't fit together very well.
My father was a sort of chemist and had a laboratory down in the basement where he concocted ointments for Ducky whenever he got gouged or ripped open, and we never thought about veterinarians. Sometimes, he concocted a rather vile sulphur ointment that made the bathroom smell of sulphur dioxide for days and he made a somewhat more potent and potentially dangerous ointment with mercury compounds. But mostly, he relied on gentian violet. He had this round cardboard box of gentian violet powder and he'd mix some up in an empty jam jar and swab Ducky down and throw him out the door where he would shake and stain the sidewalk. Later, we found a bottle of deep, metallic purple horse lineament with something aromatic in it that made it smell sweet and heavy like toilet bowl cleaner. There was a large cotton swab inside the bottle--a long rectangle of cotton twisted up with a piece of wire that was attached to the lid. We swabbed Ducky down every day until he stayed away and hid under the porch and quit eating.
For as long as I can remember, my father used the stuff on himself, too. He always had a rash on the calves of his legs and down his elbows--and periodically, when he itched more than he could stand or when the scabs would open up and grow into welts, he would get out the gentian violet and fill up the bottom of an empty jam jar, and paint his calves and elbows. My mother hated it, because the stuff always rubbed off on the white lawn chairs outside, where my father would sit in the sun in the afternoons in his shorts or it would rub off on the sheets in the bedroom or it would rub off on the long sleeved white shirts my father insisted on wearing or it would drip in the bathtub and leave long running metallic purple stains all the way down the drain.
While I was at college, my mother wrote to me saying something about a urinary tract infection and dead Ducky. I suppose he died because my father couldn't find a way to swab down inside Ducky's urinary tract. He probably would have if he could have, but he was not much into internal medicine.
I no longer have sick cats with running sores, but I do have
dogs--smallish cocker spaniels
that jump on cat lovers and make them sick--smallish dogs that hound
mailpersons who try to
spray them with red pepper oil, that jump out the door and pee on the
deck. The youngest is
Kiku, and she has eczema, too, and sometimes, when I'm soaking her thigh
with Sulphadine or
Noskratch Ointment for "hot spots," and the Sulphadine or Noskratch
Ointment is doing
absolutely no good, I think I could do so much more good with some of that
purple stuff that I
could swab all over her leg. And I know that if I did, somewhere out in the
ether, my father
would applaud my common sense.