MindSpinner

Last night I found myself at a Meijer’s store across the river, about an hour from home. I had some time on my hands, about four hours of it. I had ducked into the store to buy some fine-point pens and to use the restroom. I had no idea where the office supply section was, so I wandered the store for a little while and found myself in the sewing aisle. I looked wistfully at the sewing machines - mine has ceased working after many years’ use - but saw nothing to covet. I know the machine I actually do covet: it’s a professional mechanical Singer sewing machine with metal parts instead of plastic, no fancy electronics, just a sturdy basic machine. It’s not that I plan to do any sewing this summer. If I had money for fabric, I’d make slipcovers for the living room couch and love seat, but that project will have to wait.

Still, I was itching to make something, and when a pretty ball of cotton yarn caught my eye, I wanted the simple repetitiveness of crocheting. I haven’t crocheted anything since I was in college. I don’t know how to knit at all, though I suspect I will try to learn sometime. And I wanted the pretty balls of yarn. I settled on a project depicted on the label - a string bag. Instructions were promised on the reverse side of the label. I don’t need a string bag, to be honest about the matter, and I did not need four little balls of yarn and a needle. But sometimes it is good to make a thing, to do it instead of buy it, partly for the satisfaction in the doing, partly for the ritual, and partly just to remember how such things are done. Everything comes to us so easily in this culture. We hold out a piece of plastic and the thing we want is ours. We acquire things thoughtlessly, own things thoughtlessly, and dispose of them thoughtlessly. We are impoverished because we are no longer connected to the making.

Everything we own has a story. Everything we eat has a story. Sometimes the stories are stories we don’t want to hear, like the story of how the pallid egg came to rest on the breakfast plate, or how handiwork acquired at a desirable price represents hardship. Sometimes the stories are uninspiring, like the story of the plastic mixing bowl on the shelf at Wal-Mart or Target. I find myself less oblivious to the stories of things than I used to be. I feel the need to make a cotton string bag and use it for a very long time, until it falls apart. On impulse, I buy a small handmade bowl from a potter to mix my bread dough in, not a plastic bowl from a big box store. I plant a seed to grow food for the table. I want less, but the things I have - their nature and their origin and their impact - matter more.

So today, needle in and needle out, pattern ignored (who needs all that tiny cryptic print anyway), a string bag grows row by row, all purple, teal, lavender, and maroon, in the quiet of the empty house on a Saturday evening, while the cat sleeps nearby at the foot of the bed.

I consider this week an unusual accomplishment for a complete nobody, especially a nobody of good intent. Though I have not succeeded in helping to save the world, I have managed to get myself accused of being a shill in the employ of the government, a mouthpiece for Julie Geberding of the CDC based on the shocking discovery that we have indeed used some of the very same words in the English language (though to say different things - but that’s beside the point), a front for a nefarious plot to seize a nonexistent throne, the Siamese twin of somebody I’ve never actually met in person who lives about 400 miles from here, and the perpetrator of a cover-up plot reminiscent of Watergate. Just how many nefarious people have you gotten to be this week?

An explanation would be too easy and spoil all the fun. I’ll leave you to puzzle this one out.

Meanwhile Catapult Kid has announced his intent to go active duty after his training instead of going to college first and has requested that his MOS be changed from Intelligence Analyst to Counter-Intelligence Agent - i.e., from “more likely to live” to “most likely to die.” I keep thinking about all the difference a few hanging chads can make and how nice it would be if we had one person one vote instead of an electoral college and what a difference it would make if we would stop teaching impressionable boys the same stupid set of age-old notions about what it is to be a man.

Two small lionhead bunnies joined our household this year in the usual way, and the usual way is this: Offspring desire a new pet and are indulged because I have a weak spot for both offspring and pets. Offspring lose interest in new pet, for the most part, after a month or two or three, but I fall head over heels for pet, and so pet stays. In the matter of the bunnies, just multiply by two, and you have the story.

Pet, however, is the wrong word, for it implies a lesser position and human ownership besides. If you watch who waits on whom around here, you would logically conclude that the fur folk collectively own me, carefully train me and negotiate procedures only under duress, if then. (No amount of duress, for example, has convinced the cat that the couch is not a scratching post and the dogs that the Christmas tree doesn’t need christening.)

The white bunny, one Thomasin, is a case in point. He’s the bunny you’d most like to hold; if he doesn’t like holding, he doesn’t let on.

The hunger strike began gradually. First he snubbed the rabbit pellets I bought at Kroger when the bag from the pet store ran out. I had to drive 60 miles roundtrip to buy more of the pet store brand to which he was accustomed. I bought four bags, along with the sweet-smelling timothy hay rabbits are supposed to have, too.

Thomasin’s companion is a charcoal-colored bunny named Shawntycleer. (Yes, I know how to spell Chaunticleer, but Dark-Haired Daughter did not.) Shawntycleer, when turned upside down, looks rather like a boy to us, but we’re really not sure. Thomasin emphatically disagrees and acts on his opinions; that’s where he gets his nickname, Rapist Rabbit. In any case, to spare Shawnty a life of incessant and generally unwelcome sex, we house Thomasin and Shawnty in two different cages when they are inside and two different pens when they are outside. The life of companionship we had envisioned for them amounts to their sitting next to each other on occasion and touching noses between bars. (Dating relationships between parents of teenagers can work a lot like this.)

Shawntycleer is to be distinguished from Thomasin not only by means of a stark contrast in color, but also in his/her comfort level at being carried or held. Cooperation can suddenly melt into a bid for freedom - a frantic roiling of fur, ears, and claws like blackberry thorns. Because she (or he) is so easily spooked, when I pick Shawnty up, I’m always crooning that song,”a spooky little girl like you.” Shawnty is probably eventually doomed to give up a literary if misspelled name in favor of becoming “Spooky” instead.

But at least Shawnty/Spooky can be depended upon to clean up that little bowl of rabbit pellets, morning and night. Thomasin, on the other hand, began eating fewer and fewer of his pet store rabbit pellets, day in and day out, until he was eating, earlier this week, none at all. Nothing in. Nothing out. He wiggled his nose, turned it up, and vowed a hunger strike to the death. Death can happen in fairly short order with rabbits, in such cases, as I understand it. There’s supposed to be stuff going in regularly and stuff coming out regularly, and any interruption of the process of turning elongated cylindrical pellets into little round pellets is to be viewed as a medical emergency.

So I began to ply him with a diet of treats. He’s always liked a tiny carrot or two. He ate those. He likes apple slices, it turns out. Indeed, he likes wheat berries and lentils, too, and is simply beside himself for red lettuce leaves and baby spinach. In fact, when I come to feed him next, he has eaten everything. It’s delicacies in, pellets out.

All he wants, you know, is real bunny food - gourmet salads morning and night. He smirks at me as if to say that, if I’d let him out in the garden, he could procure his own gourmet salads and save me the trouble, but he patiently suffers the fact that I am a prisoner of my fears - neighborhood dogs, hawks, owls, coyotes, garden destruction and the lure of freedom that might make him suddenly hard to catch.

All in all, he considers his hunger strike and my consequent retraining a complete success. To pass the time, he amuses himself with the ironic fact that adult human beings take classes, read books, and conduct experiments in order to learn more about behavioral modification theory and practice whereas the subject is so easily mastered by furry little bunnies and six-week-old infants.

Shortly after my children returned home from their Father’s Day celebrations with their dad, Dark-Haired Daughter called on the phone, all the way from the back yard. “We have a present for you. Come outside.”

When I stepped outside they were standing at the back of the yard near the trees, petting a wild deer as if it were the family dog and feeding it carrots. It was a thin deer, as thin as if it were winter out, and it was apparently unafraid. The weather’s been dry here for so long that the grass has turned to straw and crunches like the husks of insects under our feet. I water only the garden, the shrubs and the trees to keep them alive. Farmers have but half the usual hay and fear losing their crops. I guess that it is the drought that brought the deer to nibble carrots from human hands and nip the leaves from the top of a newly planted blueberry bush. Still we are enchanted by a wild thing. I know. Deer may eat my garden this year. Deer will likely eat my apples when there are apples to eat. But since I was small I have felt a pang of grief to know that wild things are afraid of me because I am human, and so when a deer comes to call and does not start and run, it is as if some awful fall from grace has been undone.

I haven’t been blogging enough to maintain the interest of my limited audience, so it’s more than a little ironic that I’m posting tonight something I wish the whole world would read, just as if the whole world would.

The Department of Health and Human Services has been conducting an experiment, likely a more volatile one than they anticipated.  They have created, at pandemicflu.gov, a Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog open to all but not incredibly well publicized. The blog is “a leadership forum on pandemic preparedness, which brings together highly influential leaders from the business, faith, civic and health care sectors to discuss how best to help Americans become more prepared for a possible influenza pandemic.” Ordinary citizens can choose to respond to blog posts via comments, and these comments, though moderated, have been quite frank, indeed passionate.  The “American public” responding is in fact a rather limited, self-selected group of people who have been following H5N1 closely, AKA the “flubies.” Nedra Weinrich, a social marketing consultant and guest blogger, has summed up what has turned out to be an epic struggle on the part of the flubies to wring from government sufficient truth to save lives in the case of a severe pandemic.  It’s a fascinating struggle. (And yes, I’ve thrown in my two cents.)  Read Weinrich’s blog entry summarizing the action to date and anticipating tomorrow’s big event, the Pandemic Flu Leadership Forum, where policy recommendations will be discussed.