Funny Business

Two accidents, some rain, and a rainbow

My little brother got married yesterday and I readied myself for my usual waterworks during the ceremony as there always seems to be something poignant and lovely that strikes a chord. Their ceremony was different and perfect in its own way. Meg's (my new sister in law's) godmother (I think--sorry new family!) read the segment on marriage from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. (Then a friend of Meg's sang, simply and beautifully.)

read the full text here.

Far from being overly sentimental, I liked how the passage stated the togetherness and aloneness that each couple negotiates. So my favorite part of the reading was this:

"And stand together, yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

Kurt and Meg have probably already figured that one out. Hopefully someday I'll figure out how to do that as well. 

On the way to the wedding, the weather was humid and rainy, and we saw two auto accidents: one with a woman crying by the side of the road; another with a car and bike and a man on the ground whom people were trying to resuscitate. 

I was starting to feel superstitious but when we got to the outdoor pavilion, right before Meg arrived the sun came out and a gorgeous rainbow appeared. It was a perfect moment of grace.

The world's worst name for a bodycare line, found at T.J. Maxx:

Pecksniff's.

For real.

Amazingly enough, they appear to be an actual british company.

Pronunciation Peeves

During a segment on national public radio about how we shouldn't vilify NUK-YE-LER power just because its waste products take a billion years to degrade, I heard my most hated mispronunciation. A worse threat than radioactive plutonium is saying NUK-YE-LER rather than the correct NUKE-LE-AR. It is spelled nuclear, people.

NPR--at least make sure your correspondents know how to pronounce it before you have some yahoo dumbing down marketplace by mispronouncing simple words.

I may as well get it out now: it makes me crazy when people say FUSTRATED for FRUSTRATED. Can they not pronounce that R? Just don't want to say it? Say the R. Or you'll FUSTRATE the hell out of me.

Thank you.

Bun Corleone, rabbit don

Attention coyotes: come to Norwell, MA for some rabbit stew, fricassee, pie, etc.

I ate rabbit ONCE in France in the late 80's. It was served with couscous and tomatoes and I remember the family I stayed with referred to it as "bunny rabeet." So I kind of just pushed a hindquarter around on my plate.

It was one of those moments when the french enjoy horrifying us, waiting for some reaction as we eat. A few years earlier the mother in a french family I was staying with, Mme. Cloutier, pulled a chicken foot out of her soup and taunted me with it, saying, "chicken fooooot."

There's a resident rabbit that lives in the grass patch on the left of the driveway. A baby bunny that lives under a clump of ornamental grass next to the peppers and bolts under the neighbor's shed when we weed the peppers.

Found the remains of a rabbit's tail in my parent's yard (it's my policy to do a carrion sweep before I mow or more than grass could be flying). Where the rest of the remains are remain to be seen. My dad found a "deboweled" rabbit in the yard too (his word for disemboweled). And last week there were two fresh kills in the road. It is starting to feel like there's some Bun Corleone behind the scenes, whacking rabbits.

Or maybe not whacking enough rabbits. On one bike ride we spotted ten rabbits. They no longer just seem to hang out early mornings and early evenings. Brazen bunnies. Bun Corleone, we have a business proposition for you...

A rapture of raptors?

I've never seen hawks together until last week. Do they mate for life? I thought of a group as a cadre or a rapture (just because I like how it sounds). It's actually called a cast of hawks. 

Walking the other days there were distress noises coming from some trees that almost sounded like a seagull but I knew they were hawks. They went on for twenty minutes. Maybe they were calling to a lost fledgling but either way 3 of some kind of brown hawk flew over and back and forth making their distress call. 

Check this out for more words for herds of birds.

Enjoy!

On hearing about a delicious sausage on Saturday

It was the best wurst ever.

Words to live by from Anne

On Thursday nights I'm treated to yoga instructor Barbara Benagh's words of anatomical wisdom, dropped in a Nashville drawl (my favorite instance being when I attempted a headstand without the wall and she approached my mat to comment: "Now, Kristen, don't you think that's a little bit too aaaaaambitious?")

I often end up talking to an instructor, Anne, who also goes to the class. Her poses look like something from yoga journal, so she's a good person to have your mat next to.

Last night she had these memorable pearls of wisdom about life:
"When one door closes, another opens: but it can be hell in the hallway."

"Have a conversation while someone is there."

"I tell my students: 'Come for the vanity, stay for the sanity.'"

These are t-shirts waiting to happen for sure.

And finally, she calls her negative thoughts the I.B.S.C or "Itty Bitty Shitty Committee."

Author Anne Lamott also has a good term for them; she compares them to a radio station playing in her head: KFUQ'd.

I miss rotary dial

It's true. OK, it took longer to dial, but it made that cool snick, snick noise when you dialed. Perhaps most important, when you wanted to hang up on somebody angrily, remember how you could really slam the phone down? It would crash down, jiggle in the cradle as it settled to stillness, and usually made a kind of jangle when you hung it up.

And when you were talking on it, it felt weighty and important. A tool of communication backed by creosote poles and strung wires stretched over miles of cornfields and asphalt.

Hanging up on a cell phone, there's just a button pressed. No drama. No jangles. I may have to bring back the rotary phone!

Somewhat unrelated, hanging up made me think of this Madonna video, one of my favorites.

Some entries write themselves

Jamaica's Usain Bolt wins 100-meter gold. (Please, please name your child Lightning.)

Bird flew

Driven by the desire for something cute and fluffy, my sister and I went to Sandy Neck Beach in Sandwich to see if we could see any tern or plover chicks. It was close to 5pm. Suddenly the sky was thick with either terns or plover winging it out to feed in the sandy shallows seeming like Hitchcock's The Birds. It took a full five minutes for them to pass overhead in their veering flight. A beat. Then my sister said: "Well,  I told you I'd take you to see some plovers!"

When I got home I heard a chirp and since it was a nice day I thought maybe a sparrow had gotten in. But it was so close and so loud. I looked in all the rooms then found the cage with 2 cockatiels my brother got from someone at work. We don't know the birds' genders but we've named them Sid and Nancy after one of our favorite movies: they are a pretty dove grey. Nancy has a blond mohawk and bites; Sid is friendllier but usually beak-climbs his way away when I stick my hand in the cage.

I hear raucous shrieks when I'm not in their room; then when I come in all the action freezes. Someday maybe I'll catch them partying.