The hero or the goat

You blog long enough and you eventually write about goats.  Yesterday on a whim I pinned my mother's silver goat pin on my shirt, just thinking the preschoolers might like it.  Plus, teaching preschool is a whole lot like herding goats or cats or turtles on a rainy Monday.

The children were entirely too busy smearing snozz on every surface to notice my goat pin.  By naptime I was sooo glad to sit in the dark room and listen to the gurgles and snurgles of wee noses accompanied by one of our favorite/effective nap cds.  Gather Round is a Starbucks recording that includes Willie Nelson singing "I'm My Own Grandpa".  Trying to sort out the family relations in this song always makes my brain drowsy.

Speaking of family relations, I am still trying to make the decision to move my dad into a double room.  "Good grief! How did I ever get into this?"  I ask this question every time I have to deal with Dad's finances, feeling like Charlie Brown standing out on the pitching mound in the downpour.  Will I be the hero or the goat?  I'd be glad just to not be the troll under the bridge.


But back to goats, I've temporarily lost my copy of Gregory the Terrible Eater.  Gregory is an average goat except he doesn't like to eat tin cans.  Gregory would be a model recycler.  He could even advise the condo complex residents about proper recycling practices.

Spell Check has been giving me grief about my spelling of "advisor".  My eldest son has been a college adviser/advisor for several years, and he explains that institutions of higher learning make their own spelling rules for this matter.  My Big Red Dictionary reminds me that advice is a noun and advise is a verb.  Good grief!  It seems to be a vulgar transitory desiderative with past participles:

Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember these items should not be placed in your condo recycling carts:

• paint cans
• rubber welcome mats
• greasy Kentucky Fried Chicken leftovers.  Ewwww!
• Styrofoam cups, egg cartons, and packing "peanuts"
• dirty furnace filters
• moldy, disintegrating carpet padding
• ugly chandeliers
• pet poop
• light bulbs
• curtain rods
• documents that included credit card and Social Security numbers.  Oops!
• clothes and toys
• wire hangers
• dead houseplants
• bamboo wind chimes
• hundred dollar bills

Let the goat eat them instead.  (And that goat is a classic Provensen illustration for The Color Kittens. It convinced me for a dozen years of childhood that goats really ate tin cans and ONLY tin cans.)

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

A goat in my throat

No thunder, but I awoke Saturday to the sound of raindrops on the a/c unit out back.  This truly glorious sound has been missing from my life for months now... at least two long hot very dry months.

It was another good day working at the library, reading lots of book reviews.  I'm hoping to read or listen to Philip Connor's Fire Season after several tempting reviews. While my walking buddy has always dreamed of living in a lighthouse, I'm more drawn to the fire tower.

Spelling Man called to ask about goats and chariot, but I didn't field the call.  He wanted to know how to spell sixteenth, as in Louis the ____. Roman numerals were a new concept.

Cherubs are riding in and on this Louis XVI style clock chariot pulled by goats, circa 1885.  We know Spelling Man is interested in antique clocks.  We didn't know the Norse thunder-god, Thor, had a chariot pulled by goats.  Those goats were named "tooth grinder" and "tooth snarler":

The Norse believed that during a thunderstorm, Thor rode through the heavens on his chariot pulled by the goats Tanngrisni ("gap-tooth") and Tanngnost ("tooth grinder"). Lightning flashed whenever he threw his hammer Mjollnir. -- "Thor." Encyclopedia Mythica from Encyclopedia Mythica Online.

I believe that my hammer is named Craftsman, and that I may someday need goats to pull the Buick.  I can't believe I helped the nurse while she suctioned my dad's airways.  But I did.  Dad is on oxygen round the clock now, except when he pulls the tube out of his nose or the staff forgets. Without the oxygen he gets extremely congested, choking on his own secretions.  Now I'm wondering which is greater torture, the choking or the suctioning.

When I summoned the nurse Dad's fingers were the grayish color of uncooked English bangers.  He hadn't been on oxygen all the while he was not eating his lunch.  The few bites and sips he took had never been swallowed.  Dad kept trying to clear his throat through most of Serena Williams match in the finals of the Rogers Cup.  I kept giving Dad sips of water.

My mother's final six months were a long string of invasive medical tests and procedures dog-piled on top of her nausea and diarrhea. I swore I would not allow Dad's last months to be that tortuous, and yet I held down his arms so he would not hit the nurse trying to suction his airways.  The nurse said Dad tries to bite the suction wand, and they are afraid he will break his teeth.  Tomorrow I will call the hospice social worker or pastor, but for now just writing helps clear my airways.

Fifteen years ago my therapist asked me to choose a tiny rubber animal from a mini-menagerie to begin a discussion.  I chose this little goat, and it has been at the bottom of my pencil holder ever since.  I've been grateful to that therapist, too.  Today the goat has a different meaning.




There was an old lady who swallowed a goat.
Just opened her throat and swallowed a goat!
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog ...
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird ...
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she'll die.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Who's that trippy tromping?

Little Billy

Having determined that three sizes of gruff, neck-puffing anoles are traveling across my fence, I began to wonder if I could get them to go across a bridge. This will be a very unscientific experiment, but it could provide some entertainment, and the price was right.

Over the years, many friends, relatives, and parents of students have donated wine corks for use in art class construction, collage, and print-making projects. I have a small bushel basketful at the moment, so I wired up this swinging bridge.

No Troll So Far

No lizards yet, as it is a rainy morning. My only fence visitors are two clueless mourning doves waddling along the top rail. They seem to be saying, "The sky is going to fall; we must go and tell the President," but that is a different story.

I will have to wait for a sunny afternoon to give a lizard bridge traffic report.

Big Billy


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Hoopoe

Privilege and responsibility are the dual characteristics of citizenship. We lucky American citizens have the privilege of voting for our officials, and the responsibility to be informed voters. On this day of the Texas primary election, I had a heavy burden and great joy besides attending the post-election precinct convention. More on that note later. For now I'm talking about the hotly contested goat and troll auditions for the spring music festival.

My little sister, the choral director, will never believe it. I evaluated music auditions! She used to stand beside me in the pew of the United Church of Christ (not the same congregation as Senator Obama), and suggest tactfully that I didn't need to sing the hymn "if I didn't want to". I could "just read the words silently", she advised in a whisper. My little brother would support her suggestions with his most forceful aspect, and it is mighty tough to exert influence wearing a pale blue polyester suit with wide lapels and a navy and orange floral necktie.

We won't even discuss how I went to CVS to buy a new toothbrush, and the Bee Gees' "Stayin Alive" was playing on the piped-in Muzak. The Bee Gees sang higher than any of the preschool kids trying out for the Wee Billy Goat. An old married couple, okay, over fifty, was rocking out in the greeting card aisle.

Feel the city breakin' and ev'rybody shakin'and we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ooh, hoo, hoo, hoop, Stayin' Alive.

"Did you ever hear of a hoopoe?," my lead teacher asked. We are talking about birds, not bad disco haircuts. The hoopoe is actually an Old World bird with a bad disco haircut; cute in it's own way, but probably not critical for Texas preschoolers to learn. It says its name, oop-oop-ooping along.

The music festival troll has a big nose and a club. This is all starting to sound familiar. Few children are brave enough to even audition for the part. I want to reach across the divide between my inflated imperial status as auditioner to their young hearts as auditionees to tell them THE TROLL IS THE ROLE TO GO FOR! Few moments in my own childhood were as deliciously nasty and satisfying as playing Cinderella's stepmom in a neighborhood basement production. Well, maybe that time when I was two years old and went totally berserko running up and down the aisles of Leon's Food Mart with my exasperated very pregnant mom in slow pursuit.

Trolls and goats and hoopoes, oh my! Bad disco suits and grocery store hoots... My little brother's very first LP was the Snoopy vs. The Red Baron album of the Royal Guardsmen. The strange comedy cover album by a sextet from Florida included the song that haunted my afternoon. The "Alley Oop" words and music are by Dallas Frazier, 1960, based on the comic strip.

There's a man in the funny papers we all know

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

He lived way back a long time ago

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

Well he don't eat nothin' but bearcat stew

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

Oh well this cat's name is a-Alley Oop

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

Now I will listen to some election news, oop oop!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Get my goat

This holiday season I feel honored to know that a gift has been made to Heifer International in my name. A family in need will receive a goat to help them economically and nutritionally. That family will agree to give one offspring of their gift goat to another family in need. In this season of giving and shepherding, "my" goat makes me happy.

E. F. Schumacher's book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered influenced my thinking more than most books I read back in college. The concept of human-scale economics and technology to build sustainable communities while respecting the environment seems as important now as then, and maybe more.
So many of the systems controlling our lives lack any relation to human-scale. We have education systems where children don't matter except as they produce acceptable test results. Ask anyone who has spent time dealing with healthcare and health insurance lately, and they'll tell you they felt like the patient didn't matter. Billions and gazillions of dollars are being spent on wars where the people who should matter need clean water, adequate shelter, and the peace and stability to raise their goats and crops.

High on a hill was a lonely goatherd pondering how we can change the systems, and bring them back to human-scale, to change the focus so people matter. How can one person make a difference? What can be the impact of one goat?

In my year working with a small group of preschoolers, I hope that I have shared some moments that will impact their relationships with each other and with the environment. Those are big words to say that we held hands and watched a spider spin a web together. And we came back the next day and the next to check on the spider and its web.

On a different note, one might ponder the impact of the goat on so many words and phrases in our language. Give yourself the holiday treat of a moment in the Online Etymology Dictionary goat department!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder