I actually dared to open my weblog and pick up my stylus. I saw Dr. Shields yesterday, she who would suck out the stone-loaded gall bladder. She asked me a series of questions about my symptoms: problems with fried foods? No. Nausea? No. Chest pain? No. Does it hurt when I press here? No. Here? No. Here? Yes. "Your gall bladder is on the other side!" Oh. Her conclusion was that even though the organ is full of stones, there is no need to endure an operation as long as you are not having problems. YES!
Hallelujah! So why don't I feel like rejoicing? Probably because everything else hurts. Bleah! That's an old person for you; all they seem able to do is talk about their Job-like condition, which I could probably do if Mary would quit saying, "Why don't you just curse God and die?"
Now for the real behavior modification part of this entry! Our daughter, about a month ago, gave us a jar of tadpoles which she apparently gathered from a large puddle out at their place in Jackson County. The jar with the tiny wigglers was sitting by our front door one late afternoon when we returned from wherever. Wherever is a great place to visit and eat, but I wouldn't want to live there. Nor in Jackson County either but our daughter seems to love her country place with its puddles, large pond, three acres of land, small house, and apparently ticks. Walking the dogs today, she informed us a while earlier this evening, she and her husband what's his name? took a short cut across one of their weedy fields. So far she and he had removed 40 baby ticks from all 4 of their dogs. Four dogs! Who on earth would be silly enough to have four dogs? I wonder!
I feel like the boy in Holden's speech class who could not stay on topic when giving his speech. Every time he digressed, the class was to shout "Digression!" at him, if my memory serves me. In graduate school three of us loved Catcher in the Rye. I remember the three of us sitting on my bed and chairs in my room reading passages of it out loud and laughing uproariously. Really. The other two were my two best friends in the entire world then. One died on an operating table at the age of 62; heart, of course, but he had gone on to be a college president somewhere. One interesting thing about him was that he was from Jenkins, Ky in Letcher County, and played football for both UK and for EKU, having transferred his sophomore year. Where, I asked? Well, he had never heard of Tiffin, Ohio either. In grad school we studied together, played one on one touch football together, threw the frisbee in various places, and talked about things we loved to read.
The other one became invisible and thus I haven't seen him or spoken to him in years. Last I heard he still inhabits this wonderous globe, though he remains silent and invisible. Well, back to the tadpoles.
Mary found a large aquarium bowl with a ten inch diameter, and a seven and a half inch depth, but who measures things nowadays? She took some pond water from the back pond so as not to do them in with the stuff from our faucets, and in they went. Not only do I measure, I also count. We had twelve of them, twelve of the most curious and interesting creatures I have lived with for a while. Tadpole internet resources say to boil leaves of head lettuce for about ten to fifteen minutes and then drop the boiled pieces into the bowl. If the picture I will add to this essay shows up, you can see how large the little buggers have grown, the rock in the middle of the tank, and a leaf of boiled lettuce. We--okay Mary--always seems to be boiling lettuce for they are voracious eaters, attacking the lettuce with "wim and wigor," as we used to say, imitating someone or other back in the day. I love leaning over the bowl and watching them, almost watching them grow, it seems, for they have gotten very large, relatively speaking. Their tails have increased enormously as have their bodies, all except for one dark one who is still very very small. He seems to eat, and he has gotten just a tad bigger (heh heh) but that's it. The rest have become monsters, relatively speaking, to the point where I fear going to bed some nights. Yep.
Anyway, the exciting development, modification, occurred when they started growing legs. You can see legs in the picture. They grew legs. Intellectually, I knew they were supposed to grow legs, but to see it happen! And some people say there is no God! Well, many of the twelve grew legs. Now more have legs than don't have legs, rear legs that is. But no front legs! We waited and waited, but no front legs for the longest time. Then one morning we discovered that overnight, one smallish one had started to grow front legs. He/she whatever was growing front legs. Its (how about that for gender conscious people?) body began to grow a little smaller too, and the creature began absorbing its tail. Wow.
We made sure the bowl had a rock that stuck out of the water a bit so it had a place to get to as its lungs developed. It was developing lungs just as we develop lungs. Oh my goodness; what a marvelous world we live in. We now had a smaller frog who would grow frantic from time to time, swim rapidly around the side of the bowl banging into the other tadpole tanks in there and behaving like a lunatic frog. What to do? Well, we noticed that the front three-toed feet looked as though they had suction cups on them. Meanwhile the tail had almost disappeared; nothing left of it but a stub. Since we didn't know what would happen next, Mary thought it a good idea to cover the bowl with cellophane, you know, just in case. The next day we awoke to another surprise for the little guy was at the top of the glass side. At The Top! It was a tree frog! It could climb and breathe and it had matured into a real frog, sticking to the top of the glass wall.
Mary carries the bowl outside during the day, where she managed to capture the little guy in a small jar, covering it with her hand, and in such a condition she carried jar-with-frog to the back pond and released him in the midst of tall plants with stalks growing by the side of the pond. She poured him out. He leaped onto one of the stalks. Walked up a bit. Took a bigger leap and disappeared into the midst of the stalks. God go with ya little critter.
Two days later or three days ago now, we found a second tree frog at the top of the bowl. He got the same treatment: captured in the jar with some water and then poured out at the pond. This tree frog got poured onto one of the rocks lining the pond, held on for a few seconds, seemingly considering his new predicament and then took a mighty leap onto one of the stalks. I stood and watched him as he decided how to use his new found freedom. He walked up the stalk, leaped to a farther one and vanished into the early daylight.
At this moment we have a third tree frog with front legs. He hasn't absorbed much of his tail yet, but he is the only other tadpole of the ten remaining tadpoles who has front legs. I just went to check on "life in the bowl," but this newly sprouted four legged creature still has an enormous tail though he keeps coming to the surface and hanging there until he floats back to the bottom and goes through it all again. Mary changed the water earlier in the overnight, as the meteorologists love to say, but the water is murky again. At this point I wouldn't expect to see tree frog number three at the top of the bowl in a few hours from now, but who knows. The world is such a surprising place, except where there are a number of people bent on killing one another and reducing their cities to rubble.
I saw footage from Aleppo on NBC's news last night. Bloody children amidst rubble and weeping parents. Well, I will try to remember to keep tracking the creatures as they transition from one stage to the next, sort of what the meteorologists do for the weather, eh, while they let me know about my Sunday.
The world is still a surprisingly marvelous creation, like Shakespeare's Tempest, I bought two movies so I could see them again and perhaps talk about them here: Risen and the Coen brothers Hail Caesar! And perhaps I shall even finish Prufrock, though I can't find my text! I must be getting old.