Archive for Commentary
It Doesn’t Hurt Much When Llamas Kick
by Guest Blogger Robyn Williams
The pads on their feet resemble a dog’s, not exactly soft but spongy with thick, rough skin. Their feet spread when they walk, which I assume is something the llama evolved to accommodate rocky, mountainous terrain, and what makes them such superb and sure-footed pack animals.
When it’s time to halter them, to cut their wool or their toenails or vaccinate, they force me to follow them to the fence. They keep their big round rear ends to me, shifting right or left as I try to maneuver to their sides. They each kick when I’m behind them, drawing one hind leg up and out. It’s a medium-weight Bette Davis slap, but faster than you’d imagine such an ungainly creature could move. The trajectory’s always the same, connecting about mid-shin, and doesn’t hurt a lot. But because guard llamas will kill coyotes by stomping them to death, I’m certain they could hurt me if they really felt threatened. I think they’re just being crabby.
Once they surrender and allow me to slip a halter over their noses and buckle it behind their ears, they’re mostly docile and will follow me with little argument. Mostly. If one balks, the other stops dead in his tracks and there’s no pulling them anywhere. All I can do is walk around behind them and force them to circle and avoid me, and once they are both moving they’re likely to keep following. On hot summer days, I tether them to the fruit trees in the back yard where they enjoy the shade and mow a perfect circle in the grass around each trunk.
They are fat and complacent now but when they were young and still had testicles they were fierce fighters, brawling like teenage boys. One would get a little too close, they’d square off, stretch their necks, point their noses in the air and spit. Spitting is a normal llama-to-llama behavior and though most people think llamas will spit at humans, it isn’t really common. It is entirely possible to get caught in the crossfire, however. And it’s not merely spit but the llama equivalent of cow cud and more than a little nasty. If spitting wasn’t enough to get the other to back off they’d charge, butt their broad chests and bash each other with their long, muscular necks.
Their territoriality with each other is a strange contradiction to their need to be together. If Sparky is tethered and Alf is led away, they cry to each other in a mid-pitch, throaty hum. Alf will turn to look worriedly as he’s led away, and Sparky is attentive, ears pitched forward. It’s clear they are distressed when separated. They are old brothers, have been alone together nearly their entire lives. Is it just their genetic programming as pack animals? Is it the animal version of what we know as love?
Quilting–a hobby or an obsession?
From Guest Blogger Margaret Loyer
I don’t sew. If necessity demands, I can replace a button or mend a hem. I can even darn socks. However, that doesn’t make me a sewer. My four sisters all sew but somehow I missed that gene.
I’m on holidays at the moment with my oldest sister. Since we drove, she brought along her sewing machine and enough paraphernalia to outfit a craft store. My sister isn’t just a sewer but a quilter and an obsessive one at that. Since she started quilting seven years ago, she’s made more than 100 projects ranging from table runners to queen-size quilts.
When planning our holiday, I knew that quilting would be a major activity. So true. In the first three days, we visited seven quilt shops and two craft stores. My sister bought 13 pieces of fabric and innumerable spools of thread and notions. Our evenings have been spent plotting the route to the next stores, usually working a circular path to encompass as many as possible in one day. If tomorrow goes as planned, we’ll visit five more stores and travel close to 200 miles, all in the name of quilting.
I never properly appreciated the variety of material available for sale. You can find fabric for any age and any theme. Animals are plentiful as are flowers, trees, and pagodas. Colours are not one-dimensional. Do you want blue? It can be light or dark, robin’s egg or midnight, with stars or unadorned. Cotton may be a type of material for the uninitiated but it’s just a guideline. You have to know if you want batik (tie-dyed), prints, or solids. Bolt after bolt must be perused to ensure the right combination of colour and pattern. Some quilt patterns call for as few as two contrasting fabrics while others ask for as many as 23 pieces of fabric; that’s a lot of perusing.
So far, my contribution has been to consult mapquest.com and to navigate. I’ve also been helpful in finding sales on thread or refill chalk. My sister will grudgingly admit that I did find the one piece of yellow fabric needed to complete a child’s quilt and that had eluded her and the sales clerk for several minutes.
Watching my sister sew has also been eye-opening. I have often said that it’s a lot of cutting and sewing, then re-cutting and re-sewing. I was right. It also requires a level of dedication that is far beyond what is applied to most careers, except perhaps if you’re a rocket scientist.
In my next life, I want to come back as a rocket scientist.
Cooking – a Right- or Left-brain activity?
By Guest Blogger Margaret Loyer
The answer lies with recipes. A right-brainer scoffs at a recipe. If they use one, it’s only as a starting point with guidelines. They decide how to make something based on what’s in their cupboard.
A left-brainer follows a recipe religiously. It may be one from a book or from their memory because they’ve made it a hundred times. However, the base instructions must be there and only minor tweaking is allowed.
My sister, Cathy, is a right-brainer without par. Case in point, when my husband and I and Cathy were in Hawaii several years ago, we were invited to attend a welcome party with others at the timeshare resort where we were staying. I pulled out a piece of paper on which to write a shopping list of ingredients needed to make a shrimp appetizer that I knew by heart. My sister started looking in the refrigerator to see what was there. She ended up pulling out leftover chicken, tomatoes, onions, and salad dressing, then putting together an amazing topping that she spread on crackers. I was astounded that she could just wing it with whatever was on hand. What does that make me? A left-brainer.
I can look at a recipe and decide if I’m going to like it based on the ingredients. However, I cannot look at a recipe and decide what I have to change so that I will like it – unless it’s something simple like replacing peppers with celery. I have to try a recipe at least once before I’ll change more than that. Sometimes I’ll get really adventurous and I won’t put in the salt or I’ll decrease the amount of sugar. I may get palpitations as I’m doing it, but I persevere. No one can say I don’t live on the edge.
Next time I’m in the kitchen, I’m going to consider creating a meal based on the wildest combination of ingredients I can find in the refrigerator and cupboards. I may not do it, but I’ll consider it.
Poofs and Paranoia
By Guest Blogger Jim Luce
I need a new poof basket before I can shower again. As a guy it’s vital that I make noise when I shower so I play basketball. That’s easier than it sounds, our shower is tiny—3-foot by 3-foot—so a full court press isn’t that tiring. A poof, by the way, is a puffy spherical soft plastic shower thingy that you squeeze liquid body wash onto, Oil of Olay® for example, while reminding yourself that it doesn’t make you less macho since you normally shower with muriatic acid and a wire brush.
A poof basket hangs in the shower for storing the poof. Or for basketball. Anyway, while in the shower the other day I fired a one-hand shot from outside the key and missed. Fortunately the poof bounced off the rim and rebounded back to me. I drove for the basket, leaped, slam dunked the poof and hung from the rim for a moment while the crowd roared…and the basket broke.
I haven’t found a replacement yet and since I can’t sing I’m afraid to take a shower. I might be overstating this—I’m second in paranoia only to Woody Allen—but a poof and its basket are my defense against the number one shower danger we all face—and have for the past fifty years. Norman Bates.
I saw the movie Psycho when it first came out in 1960 and I’ve been playing basketball ever since. The crowd noise is key. That’s because Alfred Hitchcock forever changed the way we shower. Forget form and style, think noise. Janet Leigh was quiet as she showered and look what happened to her. Since then guys have learned to stand with their face in the spray and snort and blow like sperm whales. We grunt, talk to ourselves, swear, choke, play basketball…anything to keep a little noise going. Women have an opposite philosophy on shower defense. Women are very quiet. They’ll stick their face into the spray quick, then back up and say, “Mm.” Just “Mm.”
Very softly.
I’ll bang an elbow on the faucet handle, and go, “Ow!”
Women go, “Mm.”
I drop the soap, and say, “Damn!” A woman says, “Mm.”
I bend over to wash my feet, hit my head on the faucet and yell, “@#%&$!dammit! Who put those @#%&$! faucet handles in here!”
A woman slips in the shower, crashes out into the bathroom through the shattered glass door, lands on the tiles naked, broken, slashed to ribbons, and says, “Mm.”
That’s because Norman’s out there.
Ever since 1960 when we get into the shower, man or woman, we’re aware of Norman Bates. We’re so vulnerable when we’re in the shower it’s terrifying. We’re naked. We can’t see through the shower door or curtain. We can’t hear anything over the noise of the shower spray. We climb into the shower, turn on the water, and realize: “Wait, Norman isn’t growing old in a mental institution somewhere, he’s in the house. Sure, maybe this won’t be the time he slips into the bathroom with that 16″ butcher knife, but maybe it will be.” We don’t know. We’re naked, nothing to defend ourselves with but a half-ounce sliver of Soap-On-A-Rope left over from 1964. What if this is the shower?
That’s why we behave differently.
Every woman alive today was Janet Leigh in a previous life. When women pull that shower curtain shut they know Norman is in the house somewhere, maybe in the kitchen. That’s why they’re so quiet: “If I’m really, really quiet, he won’t realize I’m taking a shower. He’ll just grab a couple of cookies and leave. Or maybe he’ll hang out for awhile, waiting for someone to take a shower, get bored, hack Jim into bloody chunks and leave. Whatever. Gotta be quiet. Mm.”
You know how when you shower this little pool of water builds up on some concave part of your body, up on your shoulder blade maybe, then when you move the puddle falls onto the shower floor with a tiny splash? Sometimes when a woman is showering you’ll hear that little splash, and right away she’ll go, “Mm.” She’s in there thinking “oh, crap, now I’ve done it, Norman won’t be content with cookies now.” In an instant she’s got the Soap-On-A-Rope in one hand, the back brush in the other, the towel wrapped around her arm for a shield…it’s just her and Norman now, mano a mano.
Guys are just the opposite. We’re ostriches. If we can’t hear Norman, he doesn’t exist. If we make enough noise that we can’t hear that squeaky shower-scene music from Psycho, Norman isn’t going to come into the bathroom. Keep the noise going, you got no problem. Make sure Norman knows that’s a guy in the shower. He’ll grab a cookie and leave. Or get bored and hack Judy to pieces. Whatever.
Me, I’m going for the high risk shots, the three-pointers…get the crowd on their feet and loud. Gonna be good to get another poof basket, get in the shower again, get a pick up game going. Maybe with Woody Allen.
Bourbon Street Review
From Guest Blogger Jim Luce
Da wife (we’re from Wisconsin) is safely parked on a stool in one of the open air bars, Jester’s, happily out of the stream of stabbers and staggerers, sipping a 191 proof Jester’s margarita. She chats with the bartender, amiable young guy, full of stories of the street, decorative holes the size of quarters in his stretched earlobes. I take my camera and dive into the polluted gene pool swirling outside the bar. Across the street, between a cab and a tour bus, down a block.… Behind me, “Hey, brother, how ya doin’, like your hat. You at the game?” I’m wearing a Super Bowl cap, my Green Bay Packers having won Super Bowl XLV a couple weeks ago here in New Orleans. I turn back. “Good game,” I agree. “Coulda been a blow out. They dropped too many passes.”
“Was you at the game?” he asks again. His eyes hold mine, wet, rimmed bright pink, whites yellow. They don’t shift away, don’t look past my ear. Good sincerity technique. Overweight, shaved three, four days ago, from shirt collar to pants cuff a stained canvas of hard times. I hook thumbs in my back pockets to keep contact with my wallet and settle in to talk Packer football. He’s worn, wilted, well-spoken though, and he knows his football. It takes two, three minutes to get to it. Glances away for the first time, comes back, “I don’t mean ya no worry, friend. Been havin’ kind of a rough go lately. Haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. You think you could spare enough I could get a hamburger?” I have a twenty and three ones. “I can’t afford a burger on this street.” I smile. “I can give you enough for a beer to keep you goin’, though.” He grins broadly, busted. “That’ll work too.” I give him the three singles and we shake on it. As I move on he calls, “Hey, go Packers.” I flash him a thumbs up and move on downstream.
Bourbon Street. Once the home of New Orleans jazz greats. Now sleaze multiplied by sleaze–dark bars, strip joints, sex shops, subtle lurk of danger…gaudy, crowded, loud. The sleaze doesn’t bother me, it belongs here now, creates the atmosphere that lets the street live up to its billing of today. And it’s a good place to meet new friends and talk a little football.
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