Metamorphosism

Today at lunch

I... Maybe you're like this too. Pregnant women, especially the over six-foot-tall ones, do they make you think of Highlander too? There was one at the deli at lunch today, god, perfect posture, and a grace that comes from chopping off dozens of heads during the centuries, that otherworldly loneliness, but okay with it. She could have whipped out a samurai sword and let someone have it, the kid with the tattoos stocking shelves, zing, blue sparks everywhere, and we would have all been, ah, there can be only one.

Then I bought these peanuts, and now I regret it.

Cellophobia

[SWAT]
I have been afraid lately. This struck me on my drive home this evening. Mostly but not only I am afraid to play the cello. This happens, I suppose, when you go too long without playing. And having received a piece from your teacher to figure out on your own over the summer, a piece that is rather slow and sad and simple except that it is composed largely of chords, double notes, that seriously challenge your coordination and immediately prosecute the slightest intonation problems does not help. But mostly the former, I guess.
[SWAT]
Anyway I finally found time to unpack the cello today and after weeks of inactivity it was still in tune.
[SWAT]
Gamma and I had the same dream a couple nights ago. This is not the first time we've done this, either. I had a dream about a kitten, I said. Me too, she said. Was it black I asked. Black and white, she said. Mine too, I said.
[SWAT]
We went to the Rosenburg in the Waldviertel to visit some people and watch Shakespeare, As you like it. I thought they did a great job, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wonderful actors for the most part. We walked around looking at the gardens in the intermissions. Lots of roses everywhere. Somebody sure likes roses, I thought.
[SWAT]
Then I made the connection with the name of the place and said, Doh. The people we visited served three different apple-based dishes because they have six trees and they all ripened at the same time. They also had a fair number of flies and wasps, to the swatting of which the man of the house devoted great energy.
[SWAT]
Conversation went here and there. Beta was at a party, one of us told them. They went swimming. She gave a boy an uppercut, because he asked for it.
Violence is not always a solution, the man of the house said.
[SWAT]

XVIII

Happy birthday, Beta.

One-act play

[setting: breakfast table, early morning. a couple is drinking coffee and trying to wake up.]

woman: Georg isn't a very popular name for boys now.

man: Oh.

Last night, I couldn't stand the heat

anymore so I bought crushed ice on the way home and made frosty drinks for everyone. Gamma was having a pajama party so I made drinks for her and her friends too, only without rum.

Steven Isserlis was playing the Song of the Birds a couple mornings ago, it is a Catalan folk song. Blue lights flashed in the morning traffic, and there were sirens, and everyone pulled over to let by an ambulance followed by two more ambulances and three police cars; everyone except one fool (not I) who took a terribly long time to notice. Have you heard Isserlis play the Song of the Birds? Please do.

Björk says to me, while we play checkers in a vat of whiskey, "We are metallic orange flashes reflected in a dragonfly's eye."

Gamma has a stinking hatred of zucchini.

My other women are beautiful too, especially when they don't know I'm watching.

Progress

Rock festival venue design has improved since I was a kid. I think so, anyway. The festival this weekend was my first so I can't be sure. They have this security fence around the mosh pit, see, and then an eight foot wide security lane full of bouncers and then another security fence. The advantages of this are the main crowd can't rush the stage and squish those in the mosh pit, and it's easier for bouncers to keep an eye on things and evacuate people who pass out, and 10 year old girls attending with their dads can lean up against the second fence and sort of see the stage when their dads are taking a break from carrying them on their shoulders.

This system is better than what I gather it was 20-30 years ago, mostly involving mud.

Gamma and her friend also enjoyed watching the bungee-jump crane and razzing chickens who rode back down in the platform instead of jumping.

Before we went back the second day, I explained to Gamma: I have a slipped disc. I cannot carry you on my shoulders all the time, so please don't ask me to, because if you ask I can't say no. When I am able to, I will offer and then it's okay.

And you know what? She went along with that. The first evening had totally been a study in the economics of love and pain, i.e. "I will carry her for one more song, just one more song, and then put her down before nerve damage renders my leg entirely numb; just one more song, one more after this. Or after the next one."

She is an understanding and loving person.

She also enjoyed winding up the big kids. I asked her what she and her friend were doing up on their fathers' shoulders and she said aping the kids in back of them. Doing the same dances and stuff. Some people at the festival thought, hey, cool little kids. Others were obviously miffed, because they thought they were cool, with their dreadlocks etc, and little kids taking the piss out of them made it harder for them to maintain that illusion.

Gamma was illustrating to her big sister various dance styles she had observed at the festival. "One of the people they let up on stage was dancing like this:" (headbanging/hairswinging dance). "And the girls behind us were dancing like this:" (Shakira-hipswinging). She nailed each style. Beta was infused with mirth.

Gamma was great the whole time. Her little friend got tired and whiny and demanding, and Gamma tried to cheer her up. We left when the aggressive bands came on at night, due to the squishing danger. Gamma was cool about it.

She liked different music than I did, but was nice about it. We both liked Kosheen. Calexico was great. Lambchop was good. Tinariwen was a surprise - Tuareg rock. The Roots (from Philadelphia) were a surprise. Gamma liked Senor Coconut, which I thought was lame because Latin lounge type music? Two marimbas? Horns? But no percussion section (that is, percussion from a computer?). Gamma liked Silbermond more than I did. We both sort of liked Wir Sind Helden (I like the singer's enunciation).

And so on.

Sometimes you have to express one idea in order to make room in your head for a better idea

Hedgehog season

They're back.

It works like this: we have a back yard, with a terrace a Hungarian fellow made for us out of cobblestones left over from when he made our driveway for us. On the terrace is a tent-like-roof-thing structure with a heavy metal frame (to which we attach buckets of cobblestones left over from our terrace in windstorms). Beneath this we, my wife and I, and sometimes kids or other people, sit at night and drink wine or tea by candlelight and chat.

This is out in the country, sort of. Small town. It gets very dark.

Then my wife says, "Ssh!" and we all freeze. She has heard a hedgehog in the bushes.

We get lots of hedgehogs every year because our yard is set up to attract them. We have lots of bushes for hiding, and a brush pile under the catalpa where they can spend the winter if they don't like the little houses I built for them a few years ago.

The tortoise house in the flowerbed in front of our house also seems to have hedgehog squatters.

Usually, I have to take my wife's word for it. Here is a picture of what I usually see, because my eyes are blinded by the candles and like I said it's pretty dark:

"Look, Mig, fourteen hedgehogs!"

Alpha is the Jane Goodall of hedgehogs. She knows their habits and gives them names derived from their appearance or individual personalities.

She can hear them eating in the bushes, and she can hear them rustling through dry leaves and stuff.

Sometimes I do hear them, too. I heard a couple fighting a few nights ago. They are territorial. They sort of hiss at each other until one gets tired of it and gives up.

Sometimes I actually see them.

Night before last, there were two young ones in our driveway. Our guess was they had been living in the tortoise house with their mother and were exploring. Maybe she had kicked them out, although they were quite small. Maybe something happened to her and they were hungry.

They were nosing around. We put out a dish of hedgehog food (they sell it in cans in petstores here. As I have said before, it looks like catfood with a picture of a hedgehog on the can, but is of course more expensive) and they had an interesting reaction. One (the more adventurous one) made a sound that sounded like delight, and ran to the dish. The other (more cautious one) ran over and shoved him away. We figured this was because young hedgehogs are shown by their mothers what is safe to eat, and maybe she never showed them canned hedgehog food. The adventurous one was willing to try it, but the other one insisted, so they wandered off.

Later I leaned a board onto the driveway near the fence so they had a ramp down into our back yard, which they immediately used. I guess they've moved into the back yard as we haven't seen them in the driveway since then.

Then, last night we saw a large, light-colored one. Our hedgehogs appear to come in two colors, light and dark. Some have dark grey faces, some are nearly white. It doesn't seem to be an age thing, some young ones are light too.

Gamma estimates we have 300 hedgehogs in our back yard, 302 with the new young ones.

I've seen four, and heard another one.

More on painkillers

An interesting side-effect of the various things I was taking was the inspiration; for example, it occurred to me that no one had made an album of metal classics played on Glockenspiel, and that the perfect title for such an album would be "Rockenspiel!".

In other news, I think I nicked an artery shaving this morning. Do we have arteries in our chins? I went through three bandaids on my drive in to work, and about two feet of toilet paper sitting in my office.

The keg of beer (annotated version)

There is a keg of beer on the kitchen table¹. It is there in connection with Beta's high school graduation. This being Austria, my wife² bought it for the graduation ceremony at the school. This being Austria, it was not consumed entirely because 1) my wife had also organized prosecco for the buffet³ and 2) the chemistry class had also brewed a keg of hefeweizen.⁴
So some was left over and now it's on the kitchen table⁵ and I and other beer drinkers in our family⁶ and social circle are being encouraged to drink it before my wife has to return it.
You can maybe see where this is heading. This is the point where I gracefully segue into talking about my kid and her graduation and how proud that makes me.
First, I wanted to mention where we went to celebrate her graduation. The restaurant, I mean.⁷
Before that, though: she played harp⁸ at the graduation ceremony. Part of her solo⁹ from our orchestra performances this year. Some people at her school, such as the principal, were surprised that she could play the harp. Beta had kept it a secret to avoid being asked to play, something she learned about in grade school, I guess.¹⁰
Anyway, this restaurant.
Oh, I also wanted to say how much the other kids impressed me too. Bunch of smart people.¹¹
The restaurant was pretty good. We went with my inlaws. Alpha's parents were uncomfortable because it was urban and ritzy. The view was nice, it's across the square from the big cathedral in Vienna. The prices reflect this, and the quality of the food, which is pretty good. Service was good too, until they got busy.¹²
I threatened Beta that I would make an embarrassing speech, as fatherly tradition requires,¹³ but she wasn't horrified enough and I never really got a chance. I would have kept it short.
I would have said this:

Beta was born on [date] in [place] in Japan at [exact time] in the middle of a typhoon. She weighed [exact weight]. I rode my bicycle through the storm (carrying a small, transparent umbrella Japanese-style) to the hospital and got there in time to see them rolling her to the ambulance in a little portable pink incubator to take her to another hospital specializing in preemies. She looked very small, 38cm long, being born 10 weeks early. I visited her daily in the hospital after that, delivering milk her mother pumped.¹⁴ In the hospital they called me the milkman. Once my wife was well enough to go too, we went together.
The first time I visited her in the hospital, I disinfected my hands and put on a surgical gown and her doctor [name] gave me a tour and explained gently the risks she faced and that there was a 90% chance there would be no brain damage. She was so tiny, and yet when I looked around the ward, she was one of the largest babies there. They had 600 gram babies, too. They had a mentally damaged girl about 2 with no fingers or toes rolling around in one of those springy walker things kids roll around in rolling around the ward.
They had everything.¹⁵
Beta was small and yellow and hooked up to wires and had a feeding tube down her nose and was respirated for the first two or three days. "When can I touch her?" I asked the doctor and he said, "now if you like" and I reached into the incubator and she put her fingers¹⁶ around the tip of my right index finger. I managed not to cry, but only with great effort; I didn't want to start a chain reaction and have all the babies in the ward start crying.¹⁷
Beta came home after a couple months and things went okay except, like, for me almost drowning her during her first bath¹⁸ or the bumping her head on the ceiling while tossing her in the air incident later on.
She appeared to develop normally except for never crawling (she rolled). Before she learned to talk, she had the scary habit of whispering when she was home alone with me and sleeping in the other room, but stopping whenever I went in to check on her.¹⁹
She learned to walk, from which point on trips to the grocery store down the street took ten times as long because she had to stop and pick up every single cigarette butt on the way. She liked the playground across the street especially the slides.
This is how we did the slides²⁰: I never told her to be careful or let her see how much it freaked me out. She climbed up the ladder,²¹ stood at the top for a while and slid down. Meanwhile, I stood behind her on the ground while she climbed, ready to catch her if she fell. Then I nervously waited for her while she stood at the top, trying to stand on the side of the slide she would fall out if she fell, and then ran around to the foot of the slide when she finally slid, and caught her.
And this is how things have gone for the last almost 18 years. Beta has explored her world with curiosity and without fear and I have done my best not to show her how scared I have been, in order to avoid passing any fear on to her, and to the best of my ability I have been there to catch her if she should happen to fall. And so far, things have worked out better than I ever dared dream or hope.

This is the speech I would have made, but I never got the chance.

¹In fact, the keg of beer was on the floor next to the table, and a refrigerating unit/tap thing was on the table. And only at the time this piece was conceived; they had already been returned at the actual time of writing. Also, point of advice for people with bad backs: never lift a beer keg or refrigeration unit for your wife out of the trunk^1a even if she assures you no one else can do it and it is only half empty after all because it is a)half full and b)designed to maximize stress on your lower back, and will cause a relapse
^1a...lift the keg etc out of the trunk, not the wife is out of the trunk...
²Alpha was head of the PTA thing at Beta's school. The PTA never bought beer for graduation at my high school in America; we had to have someone's older brother buy it for us, and we had to go camping in the woods to drink it.
³Note: be careful of the sandwiches at the buffet made from the little salty roll things and ham, even if they have attractive slices of pickle in them, because they will break your teeth!
⁴A little sweet and not bitter enough for my taste
⁵See footnote 1
⁶my father-inlaw and my brother-inlaw. We didn't manage to finish it before Alpha returned it, either. I'm not a big beer drinker to begin with, and I was trying to lose weight. In fact, I still am. I've lost ten pounds so far! Mostly by avoiding alcohol and sugar. Except for the beer-keg week, and this weekend, when I went to the ice cream place with Gamma to celebrate her 4th grade report card.
⁷The name is Do&Co. Niki Lauda, who was a race car driver when I was a kid, hangs out there. The owner is the son of a man who had a great seafood restaurant in Vienna, and the seafood at Do&Co isn't bad either. I had sort of a modern sushi thing and it was very nice. The bill for eight people came to double what I spent for my first car as a kid^7a and 50% more than what I paid for my second.^7b
7a1958 Chevy Apache pickup (turquoise)
^7b197? VW Golf (dark blue)
⁸Camac brand. I forget the model. Athena maybe.
⁹Haydn
¹⁰You can imagine. Hey, Beta, my uncle is opening a dry cleaning shop, could you play a couple tunes at the grand opening?
¹¹It was a school for highly-gifted students. Why is education not the first priority of every society on earth? Why do we not endeavor to optimize the education and encouragement and help every single one of us receives at every age, especially children? Why do we not do all we can to identify everyone's talents and maximize them?
¹²In fact, the service in the bar - which is all glass on one side so you're lounging there with the cathedral right in your face - was bad. The waitress brought us menus and then ignored us until we went upstairs to eat. In revenge we ate all her peanuts.
¹³My father, in fact, was not the speech-making type. True fatherly tradition^13a, for me, would consist of remaining silent yet polite, and telling the kid later on in private how proud I was.
^13aBy true fatherly tradition I mean tradition handed down from my father. In contrast to fatherly tradition extrapolated from observing fathers as represented in the popular culture.
¹⁴From her own breasts with a small electrical pump. Not from like a cow or something.
¹⁵By this I mean, they represented the entire spectrum of what could go wrong or right with a premature infant. Beta turned out to represent what could go right.
¹⁶Her fingers, like the rest of her body, were translucent and as sticky and fragile as the fingers of some rainforest tree frog.
¹⁷That joke, in fact, was first made by my father when I called him after that first visit and tried to describe how I felt, almost 18 years ago.
¹⁸We bathed her in the bathroom sink and I got her face in the suds while washing her back and she held her breath and began turning blue. We gently patted her and blew into her face and so on and eventually she resumed respiration.
¹⁹It made me feel like an expendable character in the first reel of a horror movie.
²⁰Which were made from blue-painted steel tube frames and shiny metal slide-parts, and were located next to the freeway across from Tokyo Disneyland.
²¹In the Osh Kosh B'gosh overalls her grandmother had sent from the United States.