BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION: OPERATION CANCELED

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.

PILGRIM's PROGRESS

I see it has been a while and that little progress has taken place.  But it is Maundy Thursday in Holy Week.  Perhaps the most important report for such a week is to comment on the movie Risen, for the delightful thing about the movie is that it takes the reality of the resurrection seriously.  Jesus really comes out of the tomb, appears in the upper room with the apostles, the disciples, and it should be said, with the Roman tribune Clavius, who like a detective is determined to get to the bottom of the resurrection story, and who bursts into that group.  Imagine that! Which is what the movie does.  Clavius has seen the face of the crucified, very dead Jesus when he was taken off the cross, and yet there the living Jesus is across the room laughing and having a good time presumably with his friends.

Also, there is a novel quite worth reading by a contemporary Russian Christian novelist, Eugene Vodolazkin, called Laurus.  The heart of the novel also involves Pilgrimage, as the central figure makes his way through the medieval landscape and eventually to Jerusalem.  I decided that if I am to see life as pilgrimage I had best read the novel again, and am thus on my second time through it.  The book could very well serve as a hand book perhaps, or a kind of guide book.

"Do you not know that any journey harbors danger within itself?  Any journey--and if you do not acknowledge this, then why move?"  (297)   The Orthodox Elder to the central character, Arseny, standing before the Empty Tomb in Jerusalem, sometime during the fifteenth century. 

From March 24 to April 6: it feels as though I had fallen off the edge of the world.  That may be the problem with Pilgrimages, one may fall off the edge of the world.  Yet here I am, freshly awakened into a stormy world from a nap with my little dachshund, Simon.  I was just about to pass out of consciousness when I heard him bark and felt his paws hit the side of the bed.  Of course, as in the Tarot pack, the Fool of the major arcana must have his little dog with him, not at his feet this time but by his side. I got up and hauled him up.  We napped. Having napped for an hour, we got up. Simon won't come to the side of the bed to have me lower him to the floor though until he gets a belly rub.  The Fool always complies.  Back to the journey.

4/7/16 Thursday.  I rolled out of bed this morning bursting with ideas for this on-going entry, picking up the journey, so to speak, and moving on; but then I took my first set of pills and fell back to sleep.  Simon had kept me company all that time, apparently, sleeping on the enormous doggie pillows on the other side of the bed.  Real companionship that.  The next time I awoke, I got up.

A real journey, that which we are all on, unless our minds have gone dead and we are no longer moving, in any sense whatsoever, involves coming into contact with other travelers.   On March 6 (I wrote down the date since the contact that took place that night was memorable), Mary and I had just been dismissed from Mass at St. Clare's Catholic Church.

               "Go forth, the Mass is ended, alleluia, alleluia. 

                Thanks be to God, alleluia, alleluia." 

Mary was hungry for Famous Recipe fried chicken, one of her favorite eating places in Berea, and it is just down the highway and across the interstate.  They have a nice barbecue chicken sandwich and good green beans.  I agreed.

In the small restaurant we ordered our food and carried our trays into the small room off to the left of the small main dining area.  The room was deserted and there was a space heater at the far end.  Since the night was quite chilly yet, we sat in front of it, closely.  After a bit one of the workers came in and turned the heat up for us.  Cozy!  I had eaten the green beans (one thing at a time) and was getting around to working on the barbecue sandwich, when I noticed that we had company.  Another person, a little scruffy looking, had come into the room and was sitting at the other end, well, about two tables away.  I had never seen a plate so heaped with food as his was.  About that time Mary had decided to go back into the main room for more sauce, or something.  Since she loves chicken and had to walk past the man's table, I called over, ever the wit, or fool, "Guard your food, my wife loves chicken!"  He heard me say something, though he obviously hadn't heard what I said, or he simply chose to be curtious, but when Mary returned shortly thereafter, he got up from his table and came to ours.  So goes the journey.  He was a very large man.  He pulled up a chair from the table behind us and sat down, arms resting on the back of the chair as he sat a straddle, close to us, very close to me, as a matter of fact, but friendly.  In fact, now that I think about it, there was something rather reassuring in his manner.  He didn't ask whether he could join us, he just joined us and that seemed right.  We had never seen him before that moment, and yet there we were, best friends.