ginger

sunday 20 february 2011

Yet another zebra finch, and yet again I don't have a photo currently to hand. Ginger was the light-grey variety of zebra, and she's the only one I ever had with a white dot on her forehead. She was also one of the zebras I actually purchased, as opposed to all of those that were produced for me by my two breeding pairs. I went out shopping for another female and came home with Ginger. Because of that little white dot.

Zebras tend to be jaunty little birds that chatter quickly and move the same way. Ginger was a little different. Not defective in any way, not TOO slow or TOO mellow, but there was a very slight slowness and mellowness to her that made her an individual.

And there was something else unique there too. For most of her life, Ginger always had in her eyes this little expression of amusement. As if she found everything that went on with her and her cagemates, and everything that went on in the rooms and the apartments around her, just slightly funny. And HER amusement always became mine too, because whenever I saw that expression in her eyes, it made me smile. Those of you who know I have Asperger's and have read elsewhere that I don't smile much might find this strange news. But all the laws of my internal physics are DIFFERENT with animals than they are with people. And while it's not terribly frequent that a human will elicit a spontaneous smile from me, animals can do it a hundred times a day.

I never got any chicks from Ginger. It's always puzzled me that from close to thirty finches that I had at the apex of my finch-keeping, only two breeding pairs established themselves, and both of them contained the same male.

Ginger died in January of 1998 when she was close to seven. Another star in this Aspergian sky, with a little white "star" on her forehead.

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read... All my stars... Braonwandering...

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

(russian penguins at www.signals.com)

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

bandit

Page

sunday 20 february 2011

Not a name I would have chosen for any animal, but I say again that I had a small child, and children like to name animals. I got to choose his MIDDLE names, which were Blandiens Bendybones Bum. Yeah, yeah. You like the KID'S choice better.

We got this little bandit out of the laundromat in the first week of September 1986, a basically white cat with large patches of dark-brown tiger. Child and I were there doing our usual Saturday stint with laundry, and there were these two rather infamous townies in there with a kitten sleeping in the woman's lap. The kitten was wearing a flea collar, and I naturally assumed that that kitten belonged to that woman. But when she left, she and her companion got up and left the kitten in the chair. He didn't stay asleep long once he'd lost that warm body.

So, of course, the next humans he came to flatter were my kid and me. Blandiens, that name you don't like, is the Latin for "flattering." Bandit was an inveterate flatterer. When he wanted something, he would rub up against you oh-so-adoringly, and make these sweet little high-pitched sounds in his throat. As far as I ever saw, it worked every time. The woman who owned the laundry said she was sure the kitten belonged to no one because he'd been hanging around for several days. I argued that he was wearing a flea collar, a sure sign that he did, in fact, belong to someone. But she defeated my reasoning by saying that whoever it was obviously didn't want the kitten anymore, and that people in downtown Turners were forever getting cats and then tossing them out forever when they were tired of them. Really? say I. I'd only been in Turners a year, and spent little time there, as my weekdays were spent 9-5 on the campus of UMass. There was a lot I didn't yet know about the town. A year or two after this day, I had learned to advertise on radio and in the paper before I kept any lost animal I found. I didn't want to take an animal someone loved and missed. But on this particular laundry Saturday, I took this woman's word that someone had rejected this kitten, and we took him home. He was smuggled up the back stairs in a brown paper grocery bag so no fellow-tenants would see him. I hadn't yet asked the landlord if I could have a cat, and I didn't want some asinine butt-brain getting to the landlord before I did.

When I reached him a few days later, he said the cat was okay. So began Bandit's time with us.

I don't know how many weeks went by before I was standing on my back porch and saw at the edge of the woods a cat who was the spitting image of our little Bandit, except that he was full-grown and dirty. I called my daughter and pointed out the cat. She makes a blase face. Ya ma, I know. That's Brandon's cat Bandit. That's why I named the kitten Bandit, because he looks just like that one. There had been a method to her madness, after all.
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read... Sehnen... Neverending solitaire...

~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

the fishes

tuesday 8 february 2011.... turners turds

Yes, you can use the plural fishes when you're talking about more than one SPECIES of fish, and that's what I'm going to do.

I was a fishkeeper from 1987-1998. Freshwater, not salt. Five gallon tanks, ten, twenty, and for a while a thirty-eight gallon gem. The beginning of this era was thrust on me by someone else, who gave my daughter a five-gallon tank and heater and filter and pump, plus a couple of fish, for her birthday. It all started so simply. And escalated. And kept going.

Prior to this fish-birthday, I'd only ever had goldfish in bowls. Had never had tanks and all their equipment and all their headaches. I still maintain, however, that the headaches are worth it, because the fish are both beautiful and fascinating. And like potted plants, the waterworld of an aquarium provides a miniature OUTDOORS indoors.

There are certain horrors, too, to fishkeeping. At least to someone as sensitive and invested in animals as I am, they were horrors. Really I don't even feel like going there now -- maybe another time. Today I just want to stay with the pleasures of fish. This quote from the naturalist Konrad Lorenz (from his book King Solomon's Ring) will give you a hint of what you must face when you keep aquariums: "...there is no other group of animals that, even in nature, is so plagued with infectious diseases as the fish." Now back to the pleasures.


How many kinds did I have over the years? Reticulated catfish, angelicus catfish, albino catfish, algae eaters, guppies guppies guppies, swordtails, mollies, many varieties of tetras, including the lovely little neons; gouramis, bettas, angel fish, and more. Interesting, graceful, different demeanors in different species, and so on. An underwater adventure.

I salute every single one of the hundreds of fish who lived in my tanks, from the tiniest baby guppies to the largest angel fish and gouramis. I'm glad to have known each one of them.
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read... Mugsy's book... Mishibone...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

on poems

friday 4 february 2011
turners tricksters

Anyone who's done any wandering around on my website knows already that poetry has become very tough for me, both reading it and writing it. In the summer of 2008, when the stealing of my animals was very recent, I was still able to deal with poetry for a number of months. But since the end of that year it has become a progressively more difficult thing to do.

I continue to cite other people's poems on my blogs, but I can't tell you how hard it is. To read poems is nearly as rough as writing them. Expression in a poem is very different from expression in prose, and that is poetry's chief value, its mode of expression. I still turn to that value, but it has become an effort and an ordeal that it never was in the 46 years before the theft of my animals, when I read and wrote poetry nearly every day. When poetry was as regular a part of my life as eating meals.

I wrote one poem over this past November and December. Not because I forced myself to the job, but simply because the first few lines came to me, and I didn't want to just let them go. Over a month or so, more lines came, two or three at a time. Slowly, reluctantly.

And then today, something a bit bigger than a few lines appeared in the brain. Appeared when I was out walking at 6 a.m. in the two-degree air, walking the steps I used to walk in the early mornings with my dogs when we lived beside the river. I have no idea how many people reading blogs are fond of poetry, but today's lines that showed up in my cold-walking brain are part of my blog-life now, and have no title beyond today's date: fourth february.
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read poems... Scealta liatha... shadowpoems...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.