The End is Near (rondo capriccioso)

There, now doesn’t that sound like a cheery way to begin?  

Jim has been surfing the internet (who hasn’t?) and discovered a lovely and informative site.    If you ever  want to know what you might possibly want to celebrate on any particular date, head over to this site. 

By the way, this is Tick-Tock Day.   Well, isn’t this the day before the penultimate day of the year 2007 according to the modern Christian calendar?    If there was some stuff you thought you might get done this year, you better hop on it.   Time is running out.

I am reading a book called “Merle’s Door” which we received for Christmas from one of our best friends.   I fully intend to send this book on a further journey as soon as we are done reading it.   It is a biography of a dog, and full of snippets of research on dogs.  Beautiful, informative, touching, cathartic — I recommend it.

I took a break from the story to go out and check to see that the coldframes are open, since it is a bright sunny day.   They don’t need to be wide open, it is pretty chilly, but they do need to be able to breathe.   If we could afford the proper temperature powered lifters, we wouldn’t have to be here on the place to tend them.   As it is, the wonderfully functional coldframes we have were made using tempered glass designed for sliding glass doors.   They are way too heavy for the poor little hydraulic cylinders that automatically open commercially available coldframes. 

But the necessity of going outside made it possible for me to observe a little bit of  hawkish drama.   As I was standing there listening to the water running over the waterfall into the pond, I stood back to look at the big pine trees.   They are starting to recover from the stripping of their needle bearing branches last January.   We lost another branch a couple of weeks ago when we had that little accumulation of ice.   

I guess I didn’t talk about that, I was probably distracted by everything else that was going on.    I did take some pictures, however, and this is one of my favorite rocks draped in a veil of ice.   This is from December 10:

My mother’s 80th birthday party was a wonderful success.   Everyone was on their best behavior, and the dinner was fantastic.   We celebrated at a very fine restaurant up at Lake Ozark, Andre’s.  What a wonderful meal.

We started with salmon, lightly grilled with a sauce of mango and butter garnished with fresh cilantro.    That was paired with a very nice Pino grigio from Luna vineyards.    Very delicious.   The salad was perfect baby field greens dressed with a choice of various vinaigrettes.   I thought mine needed a touch of honey to balance the bite of the vinegar.   But my dinner companions shared tastes of their salads with me, and the other two dressings were superb.    High marks for the fresh bread too.   Our entree was perfectly grilled filets mignon filet mignons steaks accompanied by a baked potato and some asparagus spears.   The meat almost melted in your mouth, it was so tender.   I’m sure it couldn’t have been good for me, I thought I could feel my cholesterol rising as I ate it.    As far as I am concerned, once you have picked asparagus fresh from your garden, carried it in the house, rinsed it off, and immediately steamed it gently, no other asparagus will ever match up.    Sorry, Andre.  It was very good, but it wasn’t the best.   With that course we had a Kendall Jackson 2005 Cabernet sauvignon.   Very tasty. 

The birthday cake was truly amazing: hand crafted chocolate cake married with fresh strawberries and whipped cream.   With that we had a really tasty Eiswein.   After the cake was presented and served, they passed plates of beautiful pears, grapes and four kinds of cheese.   

We sang happy birthday to my mother, in four part harmony (as only befits a family of trained musicians.)  It was amazing, actually.   When we toasted her, someone started the “Champagne” song from “Die Fledermaus”, and we sang two choruses of that complete with Orlavski’s solo verse done perfectly by my older sister.    It’s probably a good thing nobody thought of Pooh-bah’s toast in “The Mikado” or we might still be in that room in the restaurant singing.   It was great, and after dinner when we were paying the enormous bill, the whole restaurant staff congratulated us on our singing.

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Wow.   I just went back and read the beginning of this to see if I had any egregious spelling errors.   Have I ever gotten off on a tangent!  

I was in the middle of telling you what I saw when I was walking out to open the cold frames.   As I was surveying the pine trees, I noticed that the Cooper’s Hawk had landed on one of the bare branches about ten feet down from the top of the middle tree.   She (he?) was sitting perfectly still, perfectly mimicking a dried dead branch sticking up out of the bare, ice-wounded limb.  My eye passed over her once, and went back to her simply because I caught the shape of her hooked beak silhouetted against the sky.   

It made me catch my breath in delight.   Her feathers lifted a little in the breeze.   Still she sat, quiet.   There were finches on the feeder, oblivious to the presence of the raptor within pouncing distance.   I stood there and watched her for a while.    I noticed that Jim had already opened the cold frames, so I thought I’d go get my camera and see if I couldn’t catch the hawk on “film”.   As I hurried into the house, taking care not to slam the back door and startle all the birds in the yard, I wondered why she hadn’t already grabbed herself some breakfast from all the silly finches and sparrows chittering about the bird feeder where she usually preyed.

I exited the house with my camera in hand, located the hawk still sitting where I had left her, and had just started it through its wakeup sequence when what the hawk had been waiting for arrived on the scene.    One of the nice plump rock doves glided in under the poplar branches and the hawk pounced on her before I had a chance to lift the camera for a shot.   There was wild flapping and the dove escaped the talons sunk in its back, flipping the hawk off into a tangle of poplar twigs.   By the time the hawk had straightened her feathers the dove was off into the shrubs in the neighbor’s yard.   The hawk pursued her for a little way and then veered off angrily towards the bird feeder where the finches were still chirping in confusion and derision, and snatched one out of the air as she powered by.  The rest of the flock disappeared into thin air and the yard fell eerily quiet. 

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I finished reading “Infidel”  by  Ayaan Hirsi Ali  a few days ago.   All I can say is, her words and the images they engender in me come up at most inopportune times.  Jim and I were making love, so tenderly and beautifully, shortly after I had read Ali’s matter of fact description of the excision of her genitals and sewing up of her vagina that was done to her when she was five or so.   In the midst of delicious passion, in the back of my mind the image of the marital rapes of Moslem women she described in her book arose unbidden:   disturbing, saddening.   I deliberatedly pushed them aside.  Later on, I mused about this juxtaposition of thoughts, and marveled at my ability to compartmentalize different trains of thought.   

I also thought about the several series of books there are out there about serial murderers, and how often the thought processes of the murderer are laid out for our “delectation” and horror.    Another way we are exposed to the objectification of women.   I have found myself reading novels aimed at a female audience, containing explicit descriptions of vicious sexual murders, tortures of women, written BY women, Best Selling Authoresses even.  I like a good murder mystery, but these books disturb me greatly. 

I celebrate my relationship with Jim, so tender and respectful and celebrating of the joy of partnership.    Oh, and we are very happy to relay the information that the surgery was a success, and healing appears to be sufficient that all systems are go.   Yum yum. . . .

“For, he’s going to marry Yum-yum! (Yum-yum!)/Your anger pray bury for all will be merry, I think you had better succumb (cumb-cumb), and join our expressions of Glee!”

And so I leave you, to imagine the group of 8 people, sitting around a beautiful table in a restaurant, laughing merrily and singing loudly, enjoying delicious food and celebrating the woman who had reached 80 that day.   It was good, very good.

Talk to you later.