Advice to my kids - Rice Krispie treats.

When you're making Rice Krispie treats, and the recipe calls for one bag of marshmallows and SIX cups of Rice Krispies . . . only use FIVE cups. The treats are yummier like that.

Years ago, some magazine asked me to write....

. . . this thing up for their magazine. I guess they'd heard me read it at the O+ Literary salon (which had the theme of "Home") and thought it'd be a nice thing in their publication. I offered to draw some illustrations, too. To my knowledge, it was never published. So here it is, years later, finally moved from some folder where I'd come across it from time to time and onto this blog!

  “Home”

There are no spinster mourning doves, old and alone, divorced by a disgruntled spouse, for example, and kicked out of the familial nest constructed of her own spit and hard work and various found materials: pine needles, thread, little bits of fabric torn from a young girl’s dress by the thorns of the neighborhood honey locust and scrap scavenged from that selfsame tree by her or the chubby hubby dove, blades of grass and tiny fragile twigs, a rag-tag construction just strong enough to hold the hatchlings and the eggs that brought them.  No spinster mourning doves mourning their failed marriages and relegated one sad day to swiping through the disheartening back waters of avian online dating sites such as FlightsOfFancy.com, MourningBecomesElectric.com, or the ever so popular just for this breed alone site: LoveyDovey.com.

 

And there are exactly zero barn owls flying around from nest to nest, spouse to spouse, one paramour to the next, heart-shaped faces framing eyes that are always on the lookout for the next new conquest, a feathery-downed newcomer ripe for “relations”, a downy fantasy fueling prurient interests and titillating thoughts of silently swooping in for the kill, so to speak. Zero barn owls sharpening their talons for the life of the lothario or the harlot on the wing. No. Amongst the twenty living species of this big, bad bird, infidelity and general barn owl sluttiness is unheard of. They meet, they mate, they roost, they raise their young. Year after year, and if anybody asks momma bird about the 10 or so chicks she’s raised in her life . . . if anybody asks that age old question: “same baby daddy?” the answer always comes back “yes”.

 And there are no lonely termites in the old farmsteads of this world, Blatteria isoptera, a worldwide menace, eating their way through house and home, one tiny piece of cellulose wood pulp at a time, and later regurgitating a part of that same meal to build tubes and tunnels connecting subterranean “galleries” with sources of food or family or love. Uh uh. Termite queens find their termite kings and termite kings find their termite queens and they stay together and true for ever and ever, wreaking havoc as a royal couple all hopped up on royal jelly and 2x4’s and fucking and eating and blind to all the distractions from all the other suitors and literally blind, communicating through touch and pheromones alone, which is maybe the best way for romance to thrive, without the pesky encumbrance of words and vision. Termite king and termite queen, living happily ever after and polishing the big turd of every day life in a nest that is really and truly actually built from poo and turning that literally shitty, oh so shitty house into a not at all metaphorically shitty home where they raise thousands or hundreds of thousands of young with love and spit and poo. No. Termite love lasts forever and a day. Lonely, they’re not.

The ape, the lesser ape, the Gibbon ape, whatever name you want to call them by. You won’t find lonely gibbons wandering around the tree tops, swinging between lovers like Hugh Hefner or Dirk Diggler or any other alliterative purveyor of porn, because a) there is no porn in the animal kingdom because b) the critters are all naked all the time anyway and c) gibbons mate for life. The only swinging they do is called “brachiating”and they have specially adapted shoulder joints and unique ball-and-socket wrist joints that let them move at speeds up to 35 miles an hour and free-swing through the air for distances as much as 50 feet, which is maybe why these parkour champ chimps don’t have homes, per se, they have territories, which they singto protect, a few square miles of jungle forest that they claim for themselves and their family, and the whole family joins in to sing so loud to mark their land and keep the interlopers away and there’s not even a pillow to be found around anywhere to rest their simian heads on but still, with love, and singing, and joy, there is a home for their fine furry family. 

And there are no bachelor beavers, no disgruntled old semi-aquatic codgers smacking their large, flat paddle-shaped tails angrily on the water on their way to a mud-daubed man-cave in the middle of a beaver-made pond - corner-worn posters of hot female beavers on the walls, a pool table and a mini-fridge stocked with Moosehead and Porkslap pale ale. No sir, there are no bachelor beavers, tooth-gnawn and tired, mere stumps of the tall, proud beavers they once were, castor Canadensis!, second largest rodent in the world! siring multiple kits with Miss Beaver, August, 2000 and 12, later on to become Mrs. Mister Beaver for life. No sir.

Angler fish, Angel fish, bald eagles, condors . . . 

And that’s only A-C…

 

And coyotes, too. Canis latrans. Also known as the American jackal. Carnivorous and occasionally omnivorous, its sexual appetites are slightly less adventurous….  Once a female coyote is “in the mood”, she sends out a scent signal that attracts a handful of suitors, who will dog her around for up to a month before she chooses “the one”. Then, she makes him wait. For 2-3 months the woo-er will bring her metaphorical flowers and chocolates in the form of fresh flesh: squirrels, chipmunks, even porcupine, until that romantic moment when she decides she has been sufficiently wooed and succumbs to his erotic entreaties. Now, Wikipedia says that the “copulatory tie” can last anywhere from 5-45 minutes (sound familiar?) and that after that happens, the couple remains strictly monogamous and begins the hard work of building or appropriating a den in which they can raise their young. Lined with dry grass and fur from her coat, the chatty couple only has about 2 months to get their lives in order for the joyous disorder to come: raising babies. Dogs that they are of the wild animal kingdom, they do notspend any extramarital time, as the phrase goes: “chasing tail”. They dig each other, dig a den, and raise their pups. Together.

Swans, vultures . . . 

 

All of them, like the diminutive prairie vole, mate for life.  Profoundly social creatures, vole couples huddle together, snuggle, and groom each other, they share nest building and pup-raising and all the domestic bliss their little fast-beating hearts can handle; (up to 400 beats per minute!) and if a vole’s spouse gets snatched up one dark, fateful day by a cat or a crow or a passing fox, the surviving vole will notremarry. They will mourn. Voles are exemplars in the animal kingdom for exhibiting one of the behaviors that truly turns a house into a home: commitment.

 Commitment, love, protection, progeny, singing, joy, support. All these critters, creepy crawly or flying high, mate for life. They build the house, they raise the young, they stick around, they have each other’s backs. And over time, the house they make becomes a home, a home where love can grow.

 

Thank you, natural world for showing us the way home. Again and again.

 

How'd you get to be so happy?

Over the years, people have remarked to me repeatedly what a happy person I am. One said she reckoned I was the only truly happy person she'd ever known. I am happy. I really am. And I've mulled it over throughout the years, how I have come to be, perhaps, remarkably happy, happier than many.

What I've come up with is this. The serenity prayer. I read it when I was just a little boy. I don't know where I saw it but it just made sooooooo much sense to me. It came to resonate deeply inside of me. To my core. I never forgot it. Don't worry about the shit you can't control and try your best to make the other stuff better. So simple and, I speculate, a recipe for a happy life.

Years later, I discovered that it's a valuable part of AA, a program for which I have a great deal of respect; it having helped numerous friends live much better, sober lives. 

Anyway, here it is, attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, Lutheran theologian (1892–1971) 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Note to the kids....

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

- Incorrectly (probably) attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (photo above) who I love so much.