K.D.Lang’s version of “Hallelujah” is my absolute favourite and periodically I take to YouTube to look for her other performances.  Of course  I went down the rabbit hole and ended up listening to an old interview as well.  I’m glad I did because in it she said something very wise:  “If you just celebrate the fact that you get to be creative, it’s a totally different ballgame than if you look at it as a means to an end.”  Yeats said “Who can tell the dancer from the dance.”  I am a painter if and when I paint.  End stop.


I was assured that retirement meant that every night was Friday Night and every day was Saturday.  There’s a happy truth in that.  But I’ve been noticing that life has been getting busier and busier again.   I am still the kid who did her homework first.  Don’t get me wrong:  I actually like housekeeping and gardening and entertaining and outdoor activities and running errands.  But add in art shows and publishing a weekly blog which purports to be about art (even when it’s not) and I realize that gradually less and less actual painting occurs.  When it does happen, too often time’s winged chariot is chasing a deadline,  and many years ago I promised myself and my blood pressure to be smarter than that.  I know you understand.


While I may or may not occasionally post, I will most certainly maintain the gallery (zannekeele.com) and its link to the blog if you wish to reread anything.  I will also finish cataloguing the subjects within the archive.  With any luck, the gallery will contain more work in progress than there has been during this last year.   


So I will say a warm good-bye and and
​sincere thanks to all of you who have shared this journey.  While it occasionally felt like giving birth to an elephant, on the whole writing has been such a joy.  Be well.  z

Probably because my mom, a sometime painter, paid attention to beauty, I did too.  Before I turned two,  I apparently sat on my aunt’s lap and pointed to every rhinestone button on the front of her dress, muttering “pretty, pretty, pretty….”.  There were dozens — Aunt Bess was built.  And that little bald head of mine was already advancing towards the future.  Bright lights and subtle darks, reflections and refractions still draw my eye.  It was an easy progression to a love of leaded and beveled glass, and before you know it, I had fallen hard for stained windows.   Our windows are home  to at least a dozen of them, where they have “sparked joy” for decades.

So learning to paint was practically unavoidable.  I realized pretty quickly that I was a studio painter.  Plein air almost killed me.  If it wasn’t the wind blowing my canvas off, it was some bloody hailstorm or the unhappy observations that shadows moved faster than I could paint!  So, because I am a sometime field naturalist and in love with nature, it became obvious that my camera would have to accompany me everywhere.  The once-in-a-lifetime shot wasn’t just going to freeze-frame itself!  

But nothing in life worth doing necessarily goes well and herein follows my sorry chronicle of doomed cameras.  The pre-digital ones were the most challenging.  You never knew what you had until it was much too late to take a second, better shot.  Then there were out-and-out catastrophies like Jon’s stepping into a steep hole in the middle of the Grand River the night before we left town to go to my mother’s university graduation(yes, you read that right).  I found out about this only because next morning I saw that he’d taken the time to remove all of the salmon flies from their cases so they wouldn’t rust, but had completely forgotten to take the soaked camera out of his fishing vest.  He’s lucky to be alive, as is his friend to whom he lent my next camera.  Unfortunately within it was an unfinished roll of a Beaver Valley birch forest carpeted with trillium which vaporized when Moose  opened the (MY) camera to put his own roll in.  Twenty years later, I have yet to successfully replace those shots taken at a particular time of year in a particular place.

The advent of digital photography simply extendeded my catalogue of camera disasters.  One was smashed when an aggressive dog lunged at Jewell.  This happened just shortly after she and Jon had both been bitten by a pit-bull type who had come through a fence to attack them. Jon had gotten the worst of it and had just attended a wedding reception rigged up with an IV Pump. When it looked like a new attack was imminent, I promptly dropped my camera onto the concrete and, with ducked for cover.

The next camera was greatly superior.  I have a general rule, however, which I violated:  never buy technology which is smarter than you are.   For years I walked around with the instructions booklet in my pocket .  That Canon EOS took terrific photos until the moment I stepped right off the sideboard where I had been trying  to get the perfect shot of a large painting.  Don’t ask.  I walked away but the Canon never forgave me, expressing its disgust by releasing its lens lock at inopportune moments. Well, it was too heavy anyway.  

All hail the invention of devices which are light but take good pictures!  Even if it did nothing else, my beloved iPad would still make me happy.  It was basically intuitive and  I could immediately do closeups, long shots on the river and videos of the rhodos.  It was followed by my iPhone, which takes brilliant pictures despite me.  But a funny thing happened.  Periodically one or the other of them would produce a truly splendid shot with unusual effects, but ones I could never replicate.  I decided to put it down to magic.

Then, about a month ago while down in the park, I removed my sunglasses and actually donned my reading glasses.  Didn’t I notice a category called “Portrait”  so I gave it a shot, so to speak.  Wow!  A tiny wheel with five teeny-weeny options showed  up.   I did’t think their descriptors werere helpful, so I just tried them one by one.  Abracadabra!   Now I know how I accidentally took the wonderful photo of the stem of bleeding heart I am currently painting.  If you want a softened background, select “Contour Light.  If it's a stark contrast between the background and a light object,  select “Spotlight” and Bob’s your uncle (if you also pay attention to the distance instructions).  ”   I should also mention that if you select "Portrait" before taking the photo, you can scroll the options after the fact. The only category that baffled me was “Stage Light” .  I googled and found this:


                StageLight is a professional lighting control app for the iPad based on Art-Net (DMX512 over IP). The software combines the classic hardware lighting console feeling with modern and intuitive user interaction design. The user interface is characterized by intelligent use of available space in combination with a huge level of flexibility.


Huh?  Let me know if you understood that because I certainly didn't.    Another post explained that it simply focuses on brightening the subject while darkening the background to absolute black.  Now was that so hard?  The writer of that first Google hit must have been a bureaucrat.

Still,  thanks to the invention of reading glasses, all has been right in my little world until I opened
the iPad this morning.   Overnight it had installed the new iPadOS.  

Everything is different in iPhoto. 

Just shoot me. 

I’m someone who likes to write to-do lists.  The unexpected has not always been my friend.  But once in a while, a surprise of a delicious sort presents itself.

I usually enter the Central Ontario Art Association juried shows and, while I normally am accepted, have never won anything bigger than an honourable mention.  Let me be clear:  ALL levels of recognition are gratefully accepted because it means that the juror “got you.”  And there’s no such thing as a “winning formula.”  Basically, all of the artists submit their idiosyncratic best with trepidation because jurors have varied tastes.  The walls are covered with excellent works.

So when it was hinted that I might want to attend the awards ceremony, I assumed it was a general invitation to the opening reception and allowed that I probably wouldn’t be able to make it, as I was entertaining overnight guests this weekend.  It seemed important to the caller, however, so I promised to try, and did in fact, arriving on time, though festooned with the hair of a highly touchable four legged guest (Cover your ears, Theodore) because we all know that I can’t keep my hands off a dog.  

When it turned out that “Sweet Melody” had won the ribbon for “Best Acrylic/Oil in Show” I was faint with delight and deeply grateful to all of those who make a show like this possible.  My beloved tried to take my picture beside the painting but I couldn’t even manage to stand up straight and might have slid down the wall just a teeny bit.  In one digital after another,  I have the same goofy expression until he finally gave up in disgust.   

Somehow I managed to discuss the painting with people who were interested in it;  they would probably describe the conversation as "She babbled for a few minutes and so we nodded."  It turned out that most thought the violinist, the dog, and the stained window had been staged ahead of time.  That was certainly the intent of the finished painting, but I assure you that it didn't happen that easily.  If you don’t believe me, check out February 18, March 19 and March 25 in the Archives.  At times it was more like planning a royal wedding than simply painting a portrait.  Let's just say that it was a huge relief to finish.  You might have caught the fireworks.

On a practical note, no painting of mine is used to being seen in the bright light of day, a scarce commodity in our old house. I might just have to drop by the gallery with a touchup brush for the edges.  On the other hand, it couldn’t more obviously be an original!

As I have often said, some paintings paint themselves.  Others, not so much, and I probably spend too much time trying to figure out what makes the difference.

This particular portrait came about completely by accident.  Mike was in our back garden where we were looking through a great pile of photo albums.  It was a bittersweet experience for both of us — him because his late wife, Sue, was obviously the love of his life - smart, kind, intuitive, funny -  and me because I had never met her and was saddened by that.  I wanted to paint Sue as a gift for Mike but was really daunted by all the small photos which might not have enough information for me to paint them.  We looked through all of the albums pages, found the photos which we both liked, and talked about their lives together.  

Although the sun was shining, we were on our largely shaded stone patio and I happened to look up to see a lovely shadow pattern playing on Mike’s face.  He was obviously thinking about Sue, gently smiling to himself,  and so, being a typical painter, I grabbed my phone and took a picture.  I can’t remember if Mike himself looked at it, but I knew it had caught him.  The painting process bore that out, and the only remaining challenge is to decide whether to create a background (probably indistinct greens to contrast with the ruddiness of a late summer tan) or to just leave the rubbed Indian Red of the underpainting, a solution which has the virtue of sincere simplicity, given the subject. 

Although I am still unsure of finding the right photographic references to capture Sue, at the very least Mike will have a painting of himself thinking about her lovingly.  It will be titled “Remembering Sue,” of course.

I’m on a clear-the-decks kick, which usually means that I start with the bookcases, get bogged down dipping again into the candidates for a purge, and…well, you know….  I keep trying, for example, to ditch Mordicai Richler Was Here (a collection of excerpts) but it keeps sneaking back to the coffee table, where I suppose I set it down when laughing hurts my stomach.

Beside Richler sits Dropped Threads — also a collection, edited by Carol Shields and June Callwood,  this time of women’s reflections about the surprises that life dishes out.  “Old Age’’ (Callwood’s contribution) is my favourite.   Physical appearance gets barely more than a nod — “In my mind’s eye I look the way I did for most of my life, with a face and body neither so beautiful nor so ugly as to require upkeep;” which is exactly the way I feel, though she too made me laugh out loud:   “One morning our granddaughter, age seven, was watching me dress.  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said pensively.  ‘When you’re old your nipples point down.”

Made you look.

Other than the obvious, Callwood is struck by how little we actually change:  ”Those of us, notably me, born under the celestial sign of impetuosity are still reacting just a microsecond ahead of thought.”  Sounds familiar.  She claims, moreover,  to have acquired in seven and a half decades only two pieces of wisdom (both of which I also agree with, by the way).  The first is that you “can’t fix anyone.”  No argument there.   More importantly, she also realizes that “if…I interfere when something isn’t fair — even if I screw up the intervention,  even if it doesn’t succeed”, she will feel less guilty “than if I decide injustice isn’t my business and pass by.  This is described, by people who haven’t given it a try, as meddling.  I prefer to think of it as character building.”  What a delight June Callwood was — funny and wise;  aren’t we lucky to have known her, if only at a distance.

I also miss Carol Shields, though her writing remains inspirational:
(I)n the calmer, cooler evenings…the phrase tempus fugit would return to me, beating at the back of my brain and reminding me that time was rushing by.  I was spooked, frightened by what this meant.  And then, quite suddenly, I realized it meant nothing.  Tempus did not fugit.  In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.  (…) Shallow time and fallow time.  There is time in which we are politically involved and other times when we are wilfully unengaged.  We will have good years and bad years, and there will be time for both.  Every moment will not be filled with accomplishment;  we would explode is we tied ourselves to such a region.  Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love,  This was not a mountain we were climbing;  it was closer to  being a novel with a series of chapters.
I needed that reminder this week, if only because sorting “stuff, while motivated by a desire for a simpler future, always toggles me back into the memories of a crazy-busy past.   This weekend in particular, everything reminds me of a dear friend -- a historian whose well-researched and fair-minded texts influenced a generation of Canadian History students.  Ron, who has been part of my life for half a century, died on Friday.  Rest in peace, old friend.      

Ron habitually involved himself in the democratic process and I have been thinking a lot about that because it’s election season again.  Like it or not,  our votes constitute a choice of futures and the torch is in our hands. So here we all sit together in the eternal now, the only time we ever truly have, suspended between past and future while doing our best to keep the present on a loose string.  Let’s practise thanksgiving every day without forgetting on October 19 that young people also deserve plenty of that commodity.








This watercolour is of my mother on her 80th birthday.   I still miss that laugh.  

​

September always hits the ground running, the highlight being our annual art-camp weekend at Geneva Park.  Fun, WOW.  Over-stimulation, DOUBLE PLUS UNGOOD.  But if the title baffles you, I recommend you read the post of March 4, 2019  - “Earplugs as a Cultural Icon” (click on April 2019 under Archive in the right column)

Let’s assume that the vast majority of the 120 artists gathered there have short alleles and that we had been careful to assure that the previous week was quiet and restful, with lots of time to sleep, exercise, eat carefully…yada yada.  And was mine?  Well, NO actually.  This year it had been particularly packed and stressful.  I should know better than to do this but there you go.

To make things worse, I wasn’t going alone, but was packing for triplets.  On Tuesday, I had realized to my horror that I hadn’t even done the rendering for two of the three portraits I hoped to finish over the weekend.   I also needed to transform the drawings on canvas into value underpaintings, which then had to dry.  And of course then there would follow three  (x 2) transparent primary layers, each of which would also need to dry thoroughly.  Yikes!! I could already feel my alleles shrinking.  And I had to remember to pack all of the triplets’ essentials --  pigments, mediums, drop sheets, lights, shapers, brushes, brush cleaners, et cetera.  Theoretically, I could borrow a missing item, but your kids and their mom are used to their own stuff.

By Friday morning, had the Sainted Judy not driven, I’m not sure I could have but she did and we found ourselves lakeside that afternoon.  Phew.  We unpacked, organized our gear and got ready for our traditional cocktail hour before supper.  Amid the laughter, the junk food, and the toasts, it emerged that we were all in varying degrees overtired and jangled.  I felt so much less alone that I made a mental note to have t-shirts printed up and distributed the week before next year’s art camp reading  “SO SOON OLD;  SO LATE SCHMART.  THINK AHEAD!”

Which brings me to the issue of food.  The back of the Tee could read ‘SO SOON FAT.”  I doubt that I am the only artist who eats her own weight at art camp.  There is food everywhere you look, and for someone who w/couldn’t eat until I hit puberty  (you try eating when you’re not hungry), I am now someone for whom the butter calls my name.  The only reason I don’t overeat normally is that it makes me feel horrible.  Next year I must try to remember that and the fact that it consequently interrupts my sleep.    What can I say?  Short-allele-ers  are fragile flowers.

Judging by the lack of conversation at breakfast, we all felt a bit ragged.  And it was only Saturday morning of the major work day, a day begun and interrupted only by yet more overeating.  Porridge, bacon and eggs, cinnamon buns, full-bore coffee, and fruit salad started my day.  Feel free to shower me with abuse.  I have to learn.

Fragile flowers also crave quiet time.  This is not quite the same as concentration or even digestion.  Every artist responds with a wry grin when someone says, “It must be so relaxing to paint.”   Well, it’s not.  Sure, painting has elements of deep meditation and complete absorption - "flow" - but they are intimately allied with intense problem-solving and even physical work.  We create art because it’s too wonderful not to, not because it’s a way to kick back like couch potatoes.

If we had thought we were tired the night before, you should have seen us overeat again at supper, conversations polite but disintegrating into incoherence as we grimly chewed.  Thankfully, the fruit of hard work was there as the walk-around that evening proved.   Even in workshops where everyone painted the same scene, every richly-covered canvas was different, even viewed through the lens of the heartburn I so richly deserved.  Good grief!  What am I - ten?

When we packed up on Sunday morning, you will understand that I am relieved to have misplaced only one whole bag of gear — pigments, in particular, if you’ve seen it.  Dream prophecy (or mine at least) proved unreliable, as it did not show up behind the kitchen door this morning.  With any luck, it won’t have to drag its own way home like the dead son in “The Monkey’s Paw.” But even if the bag is irrevocably gone, the weekend was as always worth its annual assault on my nervous system.  At present, I am endeavouring to apologize to my digestive system.  But take heart, those of you who were also there and are similarly occupied.  Like phoenixes, we artsy-fartsies will rise again, fluff up our short-boy alleles and live to make each other laugh another day.  Thanks and love to all old friends and new for  Geneva Park 2019.   

, 
The Finale of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy is beginning its fifth hour of repeating in my brain so I finally faced down the ear-worm and  found it on Youtube.  Might as well familiarize myself with the rest of the piece, although I seem to be wed to the last ten minutes.   It has been one of those lovely solitary days, with time to think or even stop thinking and let my mind follow its own lead.  Being alone for an extended period is the perfect incubator.    About being Scottish, it turned out.

Blame Bruch.  He might have not have been Scottish, but he captured the sense of that nation by doing something inventive.  While as a young pianist I loved baroque “ornamentation,”  and the “turn” in particular, it never occurred to me that a classical composer could use one to evoke swirling bagpipes played by kilted warriors marching into battle.    although the Scottish Fantasy was composed in 1880, it foreshadows  the Balkan Campaign of 1916, where the 10th Battalion of the Black Watch  won the nickname   “Ladies from hell” ("Die Damen aus der Hölle") as a back-handed tribute to their kilts, their pipes, and their fighting qualities.    Whether or not you are a Scot, you want to be, when Bruch is finished with you.

As it happens, I AM a Scot!  Or at least three-quarters of me, if you can overlook the century and a half we’ve been in Canada.  But looking back, I realize that I have consistently demonstrated my weakness for things Scottish — Sean Connery, shortbread, Skye terriers, good woollens,  warehouse sales, red squirrels, formal dances with dates in dress kilts, cool summers, Jamie Fraser, peaty scotch, my two boon companions and best of all, a Scottish brogue.

So I'm entitled to think about Sean Connery, all right? His looks are okay but it’s his voice that slays me.  I have been trying, without success, to download it onto our GPS, who has earned the name “Dim Bulb” for evident reasons.   Sean would be unable to guarantee any more than Dim Bulb that I  "have arrived at (my) destination,”  but this time I might not care.  The only occasion when I literally had too much of him was when the only seats for Dr. No were in the front row and his chest was thirty feet across.  So I closed my eyes and just listened, mercifully released from the sight of Ursula Andress’s monstrous cleavage.

If you too love Scottish burrs, there’s Scott MacKenzie, the famous flyfisher who does master-class videos about spey casting, the double-handed method of presenting the fly. Or Davie McPhail, who ties magnificent salmon flies on line.  I treat them both as podcasts and can practically hear my blood pressure dropping.  I still regret that I’ve lost the brogue that a year with my Scottish exchange teacher in Grade Two  bestowed.  Thank heavens for Outlander, although I do keep an eye as well as an ear on Jamie.

Finally, there is the "Heavenly Breed," though the fierceness of Skyes has also won them the respectful ​moniker “Land Sharks."  I knew that Jewell and Theodore  are direct descendants of an ancient breed, but recently discovered that cairns and Scotties branched off from Skye terriers only within the last century.  Skyes cover all the bases - comic-looking ("designed by a committee") but elegant;  tough-minded (aka STUBBORN)  but snuggly;  prone to bizarre phobias (Theodore turning to jelly around any one of the bikes in Jon's stable) yet brave ( confronting a large coyote);  dim (see "brave") but exquisitely affectionate and loyal.   Not to gild the lily but I like to think that Theodore’s thinking voice is appropriately burry like Sean's, Scott's and Davie's.  Maintaining this fiction is made a heck of a lot more difficult when he cries like a girl after an hour’s separation.  Still, one tries.

The weather this week is autumnally blue-sky cool so today I am pretending to be in the Highlands  -- feeling the urge to break out the woollens and the shortbread, and to go to the back garden to locate a red squirrel with whom to exchange insults.  All the while, I'm gratefully aware of doing this in Canada, where Boris Johnson is mercifully irrelevant.  So, channelling Kennedy's  "Ich bin ein Berliner" and Alex P. Keaton's hilarious "Today I am a woman,"  today I am a Scot -- albeit one who hasn't been home for a LONG time.  

  My brain is so steeped in the strong brew of literature that fragments of lines and shreds of plots settle at the bottom of the teapot that is my head.  Today, when the usual late-August swarm of fruitflies arose from the peach set down briefly on the counter, Keats jumped out, becoming “Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruit-fly-ness.”  I think it’s an improvement, actually.

Far from its being a time of calm satisfaction with a harvested crop, fall is actually a source of trepidation for most people.  I think it is the sense of returning to work and all of the surprises that come with new people and new challenges.  It normally proves to be happily manageable, but the pace certainly pick up and you barely come up for air until the next summer.

So my heart goes out to all those who have come to know the triggers of impending autumn:

- of course, fruit flies
- the odd red leaf on a tree
- wild grapes ripening
- the thrum of cicadas
- school buses on trial runs
and the two worst  - ads for school supplies and conversations that begin with “Are you looking forward to getting back to it?”

Frankly, I think it should be illegal to stock, let alone advertise, Hilroy products until September.   And it goes without saying that the question rarely sparks joy, as they say.  Unless it is an honest question, coming from another in the same boat, a "morituri te salutamus," it is an impertinence and should be ignored with as much dignity as one can muster.

So, for those of you who, in early August, started counting down the days left, I send you both sympathy and empathy.  You are allowed to kvetch.  Everybody does a certain amount of worrying about change.  You will be fine.  And this too shall pass.  Time really does fly.  Think of those tiny black flies whose lifespan is as minute as they are.  Now they have a GOOD reason to mutter "carpe diem" as they hover over my ripening fruit.  Because I am now about to murder them.

Maria Popova observes that “most of all, we read to become selves. The wondrous gift of reading is that books can become both the life-raft to keep us from drowning and the very water that sculpts the riverbed of our lives, bending it this direction or that, traversing great distances and tessellated territories of being, chiseling through even the hardest rock.”  Brain pickings, 08/19

While I might not have been in danger of drowning this week, the new novel by Julie Orringer chiseled its way into me.  The Flight Portfolio is nominally based on the true story of the American, Varian Fry, who distinguished himself during WWII by setting up an American rescue mission in Bordeaux to smuggle to safety the great Jewish minds of Europe:  “Chagall, painting in his house at Gordes, was an irreplaceable treasure. (...)They had to matter more than others, those men and women; they had to be brighter manifestations of light."  The plot hurtles forward, as Fry races the clock.

He does succeed in saving thousands of Jews from certain death.  In fact, Fry was, like Oskar  Schindler, posthumously named  “Righteous among Gentiles.”  Thanks to him,  not only artists like Chagall but philosophers like Hannah Arendt and writers like Max Ernst, survived to further enrich Western culture.

It should be said that part of this novel invented --  in particular, a memorable character who is the vehicle for a moving love story.  (The author’s Afterword advances an argument to justify such a character.)  This character's presence only deepens the theme of consciously choosing the precipice of action over comfortable complacency:
If we could pin down the moments when our lives bifurcate into before and after—if we could pause the progression of milliseconds, catch ourselves at the point before we slip over the precipice—if we could choose to remain suspended in time-amber, our lives intact, our hearts unbroken, our foreheads unlined, our nights full of undisturbed sleep—would we slip, or would we choose the amber?  

​This novel is about the precipice.

The American Rescue Mission that Fry founded is profoundly inspiring, but what really elevates this novel is the richness of its prose.     Objects take on deeper meanings:  A wind at sea describes a tense moment in a sailboat:  “The air had become taut between them, snapped into a sharp transmitter of movement and respiration.”   Later, warily  in public, Fry notices someone holding “a wicker cage on her lap, inside of which lay the shadowy form of a doomed rabbit.”  He descends a staircase “that spilled from the station like a cubist waterfall.”  I particularly loved the description of Chagall’s atelier as containing work “in its pupal state, damp and mutable, smelling of turpentine, raw wood, wet clay.”  Yup.  
 
Throughout, the sparks of human intelligence drive the novel.  When a great writer commits suicide out of despair, Fry mourns his death in both mechanistic and spiritual terms:
the drug had gone to work, shutting down the intricate machinery of the body, breaking its fine linkages, silencing its humming wires, dimming the electric light of the brain until it went dark. That beautiful brain ceasing to send its beacon out into the night.

Fry and Orringer both believe that "Artists save lives. So do outspoken champions of democracy. And journalists."  I heartily recommend The Flight Portfolio and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  I read a library version but plan to buy the novel.  Let me know if you would like to borrow it.  z

This morning I was in the bathroom minding my own business when I heard the dreaded tap-tap-tap at the window.  Anyone with real wood soffits and window frames knows that sound.  Somebody - probably a woodpecker who is tired of eating the food I gave him - is mining our house for breakfast.  Dang.

I sprang into action and pulled out the best weapon in my arsenal:  the feline hiss.   I climbed onto the antique cast-iron tub (honestly - it’s almost a century old), put my face as close to the sound as possible, and let fly.  If I do say so, my cat hiss is spectacular. The tapping stopped dead.  When it started up again about a minute later, I threat-nailed it again, and silence finally reigned.  Victory!

So it’s got me thinking about second languages.

Like Jane Goodall I was a huge Dr. Doolittle fan and while I can read French, my preferred second languages are non-human. I do a passable grouse, for example, but I’m most fluent in macaw.  Having lived with one for twenty years, I can summon up a happy drowsy going-to-sleep macaw when necessary.  Handy in a pet shop when you are in the mood to scratch an unfamiliar turquoise head and kiss a delicate powdery-white cheek.  I can also mimic a macaw's version of English.  If you are interested, it’s much further back in the throat and is a low half-growl, although it sweetened up noticeably whenever Bijou  saw a yellow vehicle - school bus or Kapoda - and tried to get its attention for the purpose of matrimony.  It was at its worst on a cartrip to the West Coast.  Her hanging perch was above my newspapered lap and she said “Hi!” to every car we passed, no matter the colour.  Thank heavens it was off-season.

And, of course, I call the chickadees down when the feeders have been refilled, and it’s kind of fun in the spring to tease the male cardinals proclaiming their ownership of a breeding site.  I can fool them for a few moments until they realize that their whistles are far lustier and that the interloper is a weenie and no threat.  Ditto for my great-horned owl hoots. I can get along in morning dove but would hate to try to order lunch with it.

I’ve been working in the back garden (AKA New Forest) trying to pull the last enchanters nightshades before Theodore gets to them and comes back is studded with burs and looking like a punk rocker.  I’ve lots of company.  The robins are busy stripping the pagoda trees of their juicy black berries so they can go and perch over the Adirondack chairs with predictable results.  The cicadas are getting noisy again so the temperature must be rising.  In fact, the insect string sections perform round the clock, the cicadas relieved by crickets and katydids once the sun sets.  I don’t speak insect but the best guess is that they play nothing but love songs like an AM station at the beach.  Good luck, fellas.  Thanks for the soundtrack.