slogging on

wed 22 may 2013 writing elsewhere......... on twitter, I'm writing a fictional story in tweets. @ziidjian........ at wordpress, there's a new page in the silly novel. www.pygmiesdancing.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/weel-12/......... there's also a whole new blog about a recently deceased baby brother. only a couple of pages so far. www.kaikenlainen.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/57/.......... a recent page in one of the animal books: death of one dear bird, arrival of another. www.allmystars.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/cerulie-blue/.......... a page on the life of the mind at www.braon.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/mind/.............. wish they hadn't made the composition page here so crappy all of a sudden.

blogger rant

saturday 9 march 2013 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ it's happening everywhere, at lots of blogging sites. one site changes their post-writing page, then all the others do too. and they don't all make the same changes. so I, a non-technical luddite, struggle to figure out the new ways and mostly can't. then I end up with published pages that look like junk out of a comic book. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I want pages that look like book pages, as much as possible. I'm not a stinking tech-head who can figure out all these arcane changes, I'm just a sixty-year-old writer who wants to write and have my pages look rather booky. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I can't get that on blogspot anymore the last few months. can't get the spacing I want, the look I want. so, henceforward, I'll only be making posts here that are links to other posts... other posts on blogsites where I can still get a decent looking page. I thank the readers I've had here over the last five years. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I will re-state that on every single page of this blog, ALL PHOTOS, GRAPHICS, POEMS AND TEXT ARE COPYRIGHT 2008-2013 BY ANNE NAKIS, UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~~~

mental hell redux

friday 8 march 2013 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ no keeping the head above the flood-tide. not for very long, anyway. recent writings on recent floods: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a soulcast post ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a brother post ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ and another brother post ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a brother blog, in its infancy ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ the loss of a young, saintly bird ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ and, as ever, the website outline ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

hema and reese break up

http://pygmiesdancing.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/cave-10/

hema's mama dies of ziza

http://pygmiesdancing.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/cave-9/

the book about the noxious town

http://turnersfalls.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/meadow-rue/

poison and snowflake trees

http://turnersfalls.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/indifference/

haikuing

http://mishibones.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/ninth-september/

page eight, no less

http://pygmiesdancing.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/cave-8/comment-page-1/

the pygmies keep dancing

friday 7 september 2012 oh, long absence. my computer out of commission since january, but maybe up and running again any day. total reliance on public computers, which are in general not available when I need them to be. another mentally mangled landlady, and all the stress and legal rigamarole that goes with it. some of the things that have been keeping me from this blog. during the hiatus I've dug out of my storage unit the only novel I ever started and actually finished. long ago I had an agent and started a re-write... things looked promising. but crap happened, and now eighteen years later I'm doing the re-write on wordpress. click away if you like: THE PYGMIES KEEP DANCING (a silly book) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

toxic turners

friday 20 july 2012 Again, again, the mean-spirited, bullying attitude that is pervasive in this town has landed on me. You will refuse to believe that after 27 years, I am still being treated this way. You'll say I'm exaggerating. Maybe you'll even say I made it up. Bullshit. On February first I moved into my first real apartment in four years. The first since the personal holocaust of 2008. After two years of homelessness and two years of living in an inhumane ponystall, finally a real apartment. And finally a little family: one guinea pig, two parakeets, one cat. And then what. Even before I moved in, the landlady and her spouse, who had presented themselves to me as good christians who try to live the way jesus wants them to, had started to act chilly. So chilly, that I concluded they had decided not to rent me the apartment after all, and was looking for something else. And so I was shocked when the landlady notified me three days after christmas that the heroin addicts had finally left the apartment, and that it was being cleaned. There were a few days of communication and paper-signing, and then silence from december 30th onward. Suddenly on 26 january she contacts me --- after all this silence when I once again decided I wasn't going to get the apartment --- to say the apartment was ready and was I still interested. The next day I got the keys and began moving in, but this coldness that had been going on since december persisted. I move in. I live with the coldness. I live with her failure to provide me trash stickers, which is stipulated in the lease. I live with the month and a half wait for her to lower my mailbox to a point where I can reach it. I live padlocked off my front porch, which she has been telling me since october that I can have, and that I can have flower boxes and bird feeders out there. The lies about the porch go on and on. The trash stickers are sporadic. I wait three bloody months for a key to my second door. Tensions escalate. Lies continue to be told. Since I am a rent subsidy client, I try to enlist the Housing Authority's help with these issues. They are next to useless. Meanwhile, I am the goody-two-shoes tenant. Rent is always paid. I obey the anal landlady's rules about trash not being on back decks, about smoking outside, and about the number and kind of animals I may have. I do not torment the other tenants upstairs or interfere with them in any way. I meet all of my obligations as stated on the rental agreement, and the landlady meets none. Finally I write a letter of complaint, which I give both to the Section 8 director at Housing and to the landlady herself. Four days later I get a notice to quit. Thrown out, after four and a half months. Thrown out, when the rent is always paid and I meet my lease obligations. This is christian. This is the way jesus wants her to live. Yet again, my Asperger's gullibility has caused me to fall for a line of bullshit. I believed in this woman's desire to live by christian principles, in spite of all the phony, sleazy christians I have known. I believed I had a landlord who would treat me with respect, make prompt repairs, and abide by the obligations set out in the lease. What I got was a tantrum-throwing, lying, bullying shrew. And thrown out for writing a letter of complaint, which is a legal thing for a tenant in Massachusetts to do. The poison of this place is intractable. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ read... Poison and snowflake trees... Mugsy's book... ~~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~ all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

propaganda lives

monday 19 december 2011


Just read a post by another blogspot writer. Very angry at The Amerikan Dream. I relate. I share this anger. I too have been left behind by that thing that so many attain, but not all. And those of us who don't get The Amerikan Dream are led to believe by those who do that it is somehow our own fault.

For too many years, I believed I would get some version of that Dream. I grew up with that damned dream. My own parents achieved a version of it: moved beyond the poverty in which they'd been raised; had a house and three children; had cars and television and a decent lifestyle. I was born in the fifties. I grew up with that dream made flesh in my parents and in most of the adults around me. I did not doubt that my idea of the Dream would be had.

Things happen in life. And other things don't happen. What many people call luck I choose to call the randomness. The randomness of living. If I cared to take the time, I could cite you many examples of people besides myself who took many steps and made many efforts to achieve their version of the The Amerikan Dream, and failed. Not for lack of effort, not for lack of desire. For lack of helpful randomness. If you are one of those who would blame us for our own dreamlessness, then I think that my immediate response to you would be: stuff a sock in it.

The Amerikan Dream is an effective propaganda with which many generations have been raised (brainwashed, duped), and presumably more generations will be raised with it as well. If you get the dream, you regard the prophecy as truth rather than propaganda. Those of us who don't get it are, I think, entitled to regard it as a lie, a con, a great slinging of societal bullshit.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Streams four... Twenty-ninth december...

read... Sehnen... Poison and snowflake trees...

~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~~


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

oddballs

saturday 13 august 2011

~~~~~~~~~

From 2002 until she died in 2008, this domestic grey goose in the photo lived wild in the Connecticut River here in turners trolls. She became a bit famous in these parts, but I never found that out until 2004, after having spent two years believing that the only human friends she had were me and a Russian man who used to visit her most days. But no, she had a good number of human fans, and I got to meet some of them. I heard stories about the various times her photo had been in the newspaper, which I don't read, so I never knew. I even heard a story in 2008 to the effect that she was across the water in the cove with her children -- she had had a family. The only geese available for her to mate with were the Canadian kind. Had this mating actually happened, or was it suburban myth. Don't know. In any case, I was very much in love with this goose, and very much in synch with her status as oddball: the only domestic animal among the wild ducks and geese and swans and cormorants. I'm an oddball myself, what with Asperger's and several other alienating issues. I know what it's like to be off-kilter in any group. And Goosie was always off-kilter there in the wild. Not exactly like the other geese, but enough like them that they in fact recognized her as goose-folk, but not really quite one of the clan.

One question that has never been answered: did she simply get tired of the life she had as a domestic animal on someone's farm, run away, and find herself a new life? Or did the humans who owned her get tired of her and dump her into the river? I suppose I'll never know that now.

Well, it's just about three years since Goosie's death, and here we go again. This year there are both a domestic white duck and a domestic white goose living here. I had my first sighting of the duck back in the spring; the goose I only discovered about a month ago. And yet again, my heart is deeply magnetized to these oddballs, these intrepid soldiers against conformity. I adore them, I envy them, I worry about them if I don't see them on any given wander-walk. They have achieved what I never could: they've found (or been forced into) a niche, and they're doing well there: making friends, eating well, flying free, retaining their essential selfhood. I root for them fanatically, their biggest cheerleader, their staunchest friend, and they know, of course, none of this.

If these birds decided to run away from home in search of greener pastures, then they have found them. They are adventurers, and rebels against the status quo. If they were forced into the river by human trolls who failed to keep their commitments to their animals, then they are victims of ugliness who have landed in a niche where they can turn their victimhood into freedom, happiness and family.

My envy smoulders inside me. They are odd and offbeat and happy. They landed in a place where they can make a good life out of their oddness. All this that I've never accomplished, and never will. No one holds them down or holds them back, now that they live wild. I will never, ever be able to live wild enough to prevent any human from ever holding me down or holding me back again. But in the case of two big geese and one big duck, I can fiercely envy and fiercely love at one and the same time. This is a feat I can't achieve with humans, because with humans, the moment the envy heats up, love becomes just about impossible.

I saw them only inches apart for the first time last night, this white duck and this white goose. They don't seem to be friends, since the duck swam off a few feet when the goose got so close. Maybe they're not friends, but they didn't fight. Just a yielding, a moving off to allow the goose passage. No war.

These oddies will go on living there among those who were born wild for a long time, it is my hope. And I will go on loving them, cheering them on, and envying them with a regret-fire that is as unquenchable as their delicious new freedom now is.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Neverending solitaire... Cutting the pie...

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

orange and raccoon

sunday 24 july 2011


Once again, I hauled myself to the river early this morning. Earlier than I usually make it out nowadays: five o'clock. For four and a half years it was routine for me to go out at five with my dogs, but that's all four years gone now, and five o'clock is often unappealing now that I have no dog to walk with. Mental hell.

Making it even less appealing today was the extreme humidity. In the last seventeen days, we have had only one day off from the monstrous wet air, and I simply can't take it. The longer such humidity lasts, the more irritable and physically sick I become. The less willing I become to move at all, because literally the instant I move, I'm covered in sweat.

It was only the memory of my dogs... my great, great dogs... that got me out the door at five a.m. in this vicious weather. Hating to face the stifling air and already exhausted from working on a song for three hours yesterday, and another two hours on a drawing. But because I happened to be awake, and because it was my old dog-walking time, and because I need to remember my dogs, I went.

I had no intention of staying out there very long. Just a quick tour along a part of my old dog route, then back inside this ponystall with a fan blowing on me. Those were my intentions. But you never know what nature's intentions are, and those can change from one moment to the next.

I was out there an hour, and it was all because of raccoons. I haven't seen a raccoon since 2002 (nine years!), and this is nearly shocking when you consider that between 1985 and 2002 I saw raccoons in this town all the time. In my yards, on porches, murdered in the streets by drivers. All the time. So to go nine years without seeing even one raccoon is maximally weird. And I didn't just see one raccoon on the riverbank at about 5:20 when this day began... I saw five. More raccoons than I've ever seen in my life all at once. The one and only time I've ever seen a mother with a litter. I spent about forty minutes watching those animals, talking to them, until they went back to their den to go to sleep. I saw them walk all in a line behind their mother, saw them all five up a tree while I stood there studying them and talking to them, saw the eastern sky behind them and their maple tree turn orange: five masked faces watching me from tree crotches against a background of unabashed orange.

I saw the children climb all over the place, heard the mother make a noise like cat purring in her throat, watched her nurse a baby right there in the tree. Afer they'd come down from the tree and crossed the street (mental hell: will they get across safely?), I saw them sitting in a row on top of a sort of fence, just sitting there relaxing. And I, on the opposite side of the road, am anxious: No, no, I say. Don't sit there all in a row like that in full view of the humans. You don't know what they'll do to you. Go now, go back to your den. It's daylight. It's time for bed. Don't let the humans see you. As if she'd heard and understood my words, the mother climbed down with the kids following after, and they went back into their den. Now I know where it is. My lips are sealed.

Brief research I just did yields disparate results: some folks say baby raccoons are called kits (like foxes), others say cubs (like bears). Since pandas and raccoons and bears are all related, I make the unilateral decision to call their children cubs. The only foxy thing about them is the triangular, pointed face. When you watch them move, they move for all the world like little bears. Bears with tails; tails with black rings around them.

Whatever other things a walk at the river may be for me, it is always mental hell. Because I walk there alone now, without my dogs. Because my last two dogs were stolen, hidden, and killed by vicious, spiteful, ugly human beings. It is always, without exception, a walk in mental hell.

But my love for animals and my fascination with them is so great that even in my hell, my rage and grief, I am charmed, dazzled and transfixed by the creatures around me. Even as I rage at the theft of my two dogs with every step, I stand in front of the maple tree full of raccoons and study them, love them, talk soothingly to them. I'm dazzled and can't tear myself away, though breathing the noxious air is making me suffer. I hold my breath while they cross the road, fearing an ignorant and nasty human behind the wheel of a car. I thank them, repeatedly, for being there. Thank the mother for bearing the anxiety my presence is causing her, apologize to her that I can't yet bring myself to walk away.

They're safe in the den now, sleeping. I want them to be safe forever, to live to be very old raccoons and die peacefully in their sleep. I want them to have plenty to eat, and some fun, and good water, and any other blessings I could wish upon raccoons. All in vain. Because they live in the center of a town, not in some remote woods. Because humans in general hate raccoons and love to hurt them if they get the chance: I've seen it all my life. Because they drive their bleeding cars and don't care. So many of them barely give a dog or a cat a chance, let alone some wild animal.

I send my wishes for them into the new-morning air, into the orange, into the nearly colorless haze when the orange fades away. I try to fill every molecule of the air, plants and trees with my raccoon wishes, with my dog rage, with my love for all that's beautiful and my loathing for the vast seas of ugliness that gush from humankind.

In readers, my distaste for homo sapiens will be resented, is always resented. I tell the truth in my blogs, my books. And one of my truths is my dislike of the human race. If you can't read my writing and understand how I've come to this repugnance and bitterness, then I can't help you expand your capacity for understanding.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Stolen stars... Spite and malice... Soulcast...

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

smoky

30 may 2011

The fourth guinea pig of my years. Half-way to Princess Shiloh-Chailin, the one I have now. Short-haired, all black, no rosettes (supposedly decorative cowlicks). Born late in 1984, and from January to June of 85, he belonged to my parents. They'd got a pair of pigs for themselves composed of male Smoky for Dad and an orange and white female called Peach Blossom for my mother. When my daughter was out for a summer visit with my parents, she returned with Smoky. Not having been present, I don't know whether Dad simply offered the pig (my father was never much into caged animals, though he was kind to them), or if the daughter wheedled to get Smoky. Whichever it was, he became ours. He was the beginning of the second continuous animal family of my life, the one in western Mass. The FIRST continuous animal family had extended from my birth until the age of 31, when the last cat of my eastern Mass life died. Then my daughter and I moved west when I was 32, and Smoky was the first member of the second continuous family that would go on until 12 March of 2008.

He was smart, he was good, and he was fun. And while he remained an only child, he was king of all he surveyed. In the spring of 1986 I got him a buddy, as I hate to see any animal living without another one of its own kind. And what did they have in the pet shop in Hadley but a nearly full-grown male, short-haired with no rosettes, and all WHITE. I loved the idea of the all black and the all white, so home the new guy came with us. I called him Snowball.

I repeat that male guinea pigs can't share a cage once they both reach sexual maturity. We had a few months when they could be snuggle-buddies, the all black and the all white, but when Snowball became a man, we had to separate them. I put their two cages side-by-side so they could still always see each other, lie down side-by-side with the glass between them. And there were supervised playtimes of freedom on the floors.

On 31 May 1988, Smoky died. It wasn't wet-tail, but I don't know what DID take him. He was three and a half years old, and at that point in time I had never had a guinea pig live longer than that. The three before Smoky had all died at almost exactly the same age.

He began a second animal family that I thought would persist for the rest of my days. On the day Smoky died in my hands, I couldn't foresee the mafia-chick or the psychotic landlady or the spiteful, lazy caseworkers of the Department of Mental hell who would one day demolish that family that Smoky had begun, and demolish me with them.


read... Spite and Malice... Stolen Stars
~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

julia

tuesday 10 may 2011


Julia, or Juliana, or Yuliana. Her name mutated throughout each day, depending on what I felt like calling her. She ended up being buried in my plot in the community garden. Not my usual practice, but since there were urgent bullyings going on from the landlord -- that was the alchoholic landlord that time -- I wanted Julia safely buried someplace nice before a disaster might occur. I dug up a young iris I had and buried Julia beneath it. That plot was taken away from me two years later by the wisdom of certain turners falls twitidiots who decided that since I'd been sick for three months and hadn't been able to garden, I didn't deserve to have the plot anymore, after six years. Anyway, since a zebra finch, as I've said before, only weighs about an ounce, I'm sure two years were enough time for her compounds to peacefully return to the soil and the air.

Julia was the too-late wife I'd bought for finch Zachary in 2001. By rights she ought to have lived a lot longer than two years (most of my finches did), but birds are prone to various parasites and a host of viral and bacterial infections. Back in the early 90's I found in a used bookstore a copy of Robert Stroud's Diseases of Birds (at least I think that's the title). Stroud was the famous (to certain generations) Bird Man of Alcatraz. A murderer serving a life sentence in the prison at Alcatraz. I'd heard of this man since childhood, and had always been interested in the idea of someone like a murderer wanting to study bird biology while he was in the slammer. By the time I found his long out-of-print book, I was a birdkeeper myself, and decided to buy and read it.

So many possible diseases, and so little time. I'm sure that by the 90's many of the diseases pet birds can contract have been eradicated, and I felt I could dismiss as outdated certain ailments discussed in the book. But there are enough left to give me a fright, and it did.

So which of these ailments took Julia? I don't know. But I carry the remorse for a mistake I made in her treatment that may have precipitated her death, or halted a slow recovery, or both. One important task in treating sick birds is to keep them very warm, and I'd been doing that. Julia was in a little hospital cage with a heating pad under it and a light blanket covering it, vitamins and antibiotic in the water, etc. But on the day in May on which she died, the outdoor temperature had taken a spike upwards, the apartment had got uncomfortably warm, and I was afraid there would be TOO much heat for her, just when she seemed to be making steady, if slow, headway. So before bed I turned off the heating pad, fearing to give her heatstroke, and in the morning she was dead. I know from talking to other finchkeepers, and from some reading, that it's a real crap shoot with these little birds. Some of them live five or six or seven years with not much effort on the human's part, and others die suddenly and young. The hospital techniques save some, and don't save others.

Julia was my last finch. Haven't had another one since her death. If I ever get myself moved out of this ponystall the guinea pig and I now inhabit, I want to have a pair of finches again. I love the chattering they do, and their tiny but energetic bodies. Bodies may be small, but their spirits are large and sweet and fun.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read... Lifelines... All my stars
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(photo: enhanced detail from greeting card)

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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

peter II

monday 9 may 2011


This particular Peter was one I got for my daughter when she was three. He came from a farm near a friend of ours, and there were lots of young bunnies, so we wandered among the cages until kid decided which one. The bunny was still pretty small, so child got to think of it as a baby, which, of course, children like. He was short-haired, colored in grey patches and white patches.

Myself was 29 at the time, and had previously had three different rabbits, but had had them when I was quite young. I didn't KNOW much about rabbits. We went to a farmy sort of store that my dad knew about to buy a cage for the rabbit, who was going to live in the screened-in patio attached to our breezeway. The man who owned the store told us we had to watch the teeth, that rabbits' teeth keep growing and if they get too long they need to be cut. I'd never heard of this looming menace before. My first two rabbits had been killed in their hutch by weasels, both at once. And my third rabbit had lived to be seven, in a hutch beside the garage. Now I had something new to get anxiety over.

Little Peter was often brought into my daughter's room to hop around and interact with us, and for a while things went fine. Even the farm store guy had thought there would be no real trouble, since Peter had a wooden cage that he could chew on any time his teeth needed it.

His appetite dropped, his spirit dropped, and then I remembered the tooth thing. Dad and I looked at the teeth, and they did seem long, so he cut them. But Peter died anyway, on mother's day 1983, when he was less than a year old. Daughter didn't seem much bothered by the death, but I, naturally, was brought very low. When we went back to the farm store, the man said the teeth were probably cut too late, and that in the meantime Peter, in his compromised state, had contracted some rabbit bacterium or something. Even then, in 1983, you did not take rabbits to the vet in the area where I lived. There were no vets who treated them. Vets who treated guinea pigs were still fairly new. When you had a bird or a rabbit who was ailing, the places you went to for advice were farmers and breeders. And considering the experience I've had with vets vis a vis rabbits SINCE then, the farmers and breeders didn't do badly at all.

Twenty-eight years it's been, and I can still see Peter lying on a red and pink towel at the base of the willow, just shortly before he died. I wanted him to die outside, breathing the outside air and hearing the breeze and the birds around him. I was there too, sitting on the ground beside him, petting him and talking to him until there was no more Peter. And I still, twenty-eight years later, get the lump in the throat and the little sting in the chest because I didn't remember the tooth thing sooner. That whip comes out, the whip of remorse that I blew it. I'm not complaining. I believe that people should feel remorse. This is, like many of my other convictions, absolutely passe and despised in the hollow human ambience we dwell in in 2011.


~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read... Stolen stars... All my stars
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

antoinette

tuesday 12 april 2011


No, she wasn't named after the French queen who said "if the poor have no bread, let them eat cake," and was ultimately guillotined by the proletariat. Why would I name one of my animals after someone like that? No, her name came about as the result of a traumatic event in her life.

In September of 1992, when Antoinette was a little over a year old (and I'm ashamed to say I hadn't yet named her), I let her and all the other little zebra finches out of their cages for their play. The larger birds got their turns on different days. This was a long-established routine in our family, and had always gone reasonably well. Among the larger birds who watched while the little ones had their play were some lovebirds, who, as I've said elsewhere, are notorious biters of feet and legs. But there had never been any serious injuries, and I had come into a complacency that believed there never WOULD be.

I had checked on the finches a couple of times and found nothing amiss. But when I went in to round them up and get them back into their cages, I found blood. Blood on a windowill, on the window, and a number of other things. It was a LOT of blood, when you consider that a zebra finch only weighs about an ounce and can lose a life-threatening amount of blood very quickly. And birds can go into shock very easily as well.

Having found all the blood, I still had to find the bird that was producing it. Several finches were hunted, caught in my hand, and examined before I found the right one. A little off-white girl without a name. And there it was. A leg, I'm pretty sure it was the right, bitten very high up near the hip. Bitten NEARLY clean through, but not quite, and dangling by a very thin thread of what? Skin? Tendon? I wasn't sure. The thread was so infinitessimally thin that I hoped the thing would just break off on its own.

This was a Saturday afternoon. My mother was staying the weekend with my daughter and me, but it was no ordinary visit. We had big plans. Big for US, at least. On Sunday we were heading off very early in the morning for a bus trip to the Bronx Zoo. This trip had been planned for months, and my mother had paid for most of it because I was a poor single mom out of work, and we were all three looking forward to it. A big day out for mother, daughter and granddaughter.

It's agonizing for me when I have to choose between an animal and the humans, and I almost always decide in favor of the animal, but this time was different. I was willing to ruin my OWN trip to the zoo (but not exactly happy about it) by calling the vet, having my mother take me and bird over there, and using my zoo spending money to pay the extra for an emergency vet appointment for this bird. But as I thought about these things all that afternoon and evening, I found I wasn't willing to risk ruining the trip for my mother and daughter. If the vet had said the bird needed to be watched very closely for a couple of days, and needed this or that medication every four hours, I would have stayed home from the zoo, and I doubt that the others would have gone without me. I was the mediator between them. And even if they had gone, they wouldn't have had a very good time without that mediation.

So I took care of my bird myself, keeping her very warm, putting antibiotic in her water and making her drink little bits of it through a dropper, until early on Sunday morning when we had to leave. I left her with huge reluctance, fearing to find a dead bird when I returned. I put on a good front for mother and daughter all day, and of course I did enjoy the zoo. But in my mind every few minutes all day long and into the night: is she all right? is she still alive?

Late Sunday night we got back. She was still alive. She was warm and eating and managing to move from perch to dishes with this dangling leg, but it wasn't easy. Next day she went to the vet, but there wasn't an opening until the afternoon, so every hour of waiting seemed like three.

That leg just has to come off. There's no fixing it. This from the vet. I start asking quetions. When can you do it, what do you use for anesthetic, bla bla. Vet says we'll just do it right now. It's just a snip and a stitch on the little stump. No anesthetic for a brid this small. We'll wrap her in a towel and that will keep her dark and calm until it's finshed. There are very few nerve endings in a bird's leg.

I paced the parking lot smoking cigarettes, certain that that tiny little bird had already had way too much stress, and that being held and wrapped and snipped by strangers would just finish her off. Heart attack of the massive type. This is a very easy thing to happen to a bird, death from stress.

She, my plucky little soldier, did not die. She seemed, in fact, extremely happy that that dangling thing had been taken away. There was no post-op infection or faiing, the stitch was removed when it was time (and I think I did it myself), and all ended happily. As I watched her through the remaining five and a half years of her life, I did so with enormous pride in her survival, her courage through massive blood loss and stress and strangers and snipping and stitiching. Not to mention the compensations a bird with one leg needs to make in order to balance and jump.

Overall I'm a depressive, cynical, serious individual. There is not a long list of things in this life that cause me to feel joyful, but seeing animals overcome obstacles is right at the top of that list. I feel that joy every single time I watch that animal overcoming that obstacle, and so it was with this little bird. The same is not true of humans. You don't like reading that, I'm sure, and think me an unappealing shit, I'm sure, but it's the way I was made. Animals have always been fascinating and loveable and desirable to me, whereas humans are difficult,nasty and unreliable.

The year before the biting of the little bird leg, this same vet had amputated the leg of a guinea pig I had who was called Tony. At the end of the bird amputation, we were setting up a file for the little finch, and the vet asked her name. She doesn't have one. Let's call her Antonia, after your other amputee. So the file was set up for Antonia the finch. Over the next week or so, I decided I liked Antoinette better, and that's what I always called her. Antoinetti, to be precise.

And that's how she got her name. Because a lovebird bit her leg nearly off, and this bite resulted in amputation, and a guinea pig who'd ALSO had an amputation was called Tony. A circuitous and odd route to something as routine as a name.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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read... Stolen stars... Mugsy's book
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(fairy at www.toscano.com)

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coco

tuesday 12 april, 2011... turners fails


Coco was a little brown mouse that I bought in 1995 at the request of my daughter's boyfriend, who was staying with us at the time. While there were many pets in our home, he didn't have one of his own, and he asked for the mouse. So I bought the mouse and the wheel, etc, as a gift to him.

Eight or nine months after getting Coco, this seventeen-year-old boyfriend decided to return to his parents. Fine, don't have a big problem with that. What I have a problem with is that he left his mouse behind. Not because I didn't want her; on the contrary, I loved her and was happy to have her. But all this love and adoration that boyfriend spoke of over all those months seem to have been what? An act? A temporary infatuation? Or was he afraid his parents wouldn't ALLOW him the mouse, and he'd only have to bring it back to me? He never has explained to me why he walked out on this animal he played with nearly every day, and so I'm left to speculation. I'll say on his behalf that his parents were very twisted people who made him very unhappy, and I can certainly picture his mother screaming "You're not having a dirty mouse in MY home!"

So she was mine after his defection, until she died on 12 April 1996, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I can't speak for others, but for me, INSIDE me, all animals, people and objects take on the flavor of the circumstances that existed when they entered my life. And if those circumstances cease to exist, as they usually do, then the person or object or animal that remains still carries that flavor, that time and place. The parting between my daughter and the boyfriend was fraught with tension, and so he made no return visits to us or to Coco. Every day that I cared for her after he was gone, she was a little brown handful of life and beauty, but also of his going, and of his never coming again, and of his turning his back on her, whatever the reason. When SHE died, another piece of HIM, and of our time together, died along with her.

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(stars from a greeting card)

read... All my stars... Stolen stars
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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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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...

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(russian penguins at www.signals.com)

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