Memorable Times

We have just said goodbye to the last of our children/grandchildren visitors for the summer. Always good to have them come, sad to have them leave, and then we lie down and take a long rest. This last visit featured accounts of all the recent animal mayhem, of course, as well as a bear sighting. While walking back from the beach, a couple of blocks from our house, they found themselves coming up the road while the local bear was going cross the road. Great excitement all round!

Mayhem continues in our life as a heron arrives at the frog pond to consume the frogs (2) and a host of goldfish. Of course, they’re always at risk; it’s like leaving chickens around for coyotes and raccoons. But you can’t very well put the goldfish from the pond in a bowl every night, the way you put chickens in their coop (or their ‘chicken vault,’ as my son refers to his daughter’s chickens’ very safe night-time abode). And even if you could or did, the herons are out looking in the daytime. In fact, the fish are probably pretty safe at night. It’s the day-flying herons that are the menace. And were not even used to thinking of herons as menaces. That is, I suppose, the trouble with romanticizing the natural world. There is a great chain of eating that we have sort of lost touch with…at least as participants. Well, not that we don’t hold our place in that great chain of eating, but we have lost touch with the fact that we’re in the chain. It’s more like, ‘well, they’re eating each other out in the fields, whereas we are going to a nice restaurant where it's called cuisine not animals.’

This past spring we watched about 5 DVD’s worth of the BBC’s Planet Earth, which had wonderful photography but the most tedious narration in the history of the movies, with its endless, ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Look! There comes a big animal to eat this cute little baby-sized animal.’ More recently, we’ve been watching The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer, which have a different format for their mayhem. The ones we’ve seen so far have tended to focus on a world in which objects take on a life of their own, and that life is not, necessarily, one that bodes well for people. Maybe we’re just in a time when we humans feel particularly threatened. Svankmajer is one of the most famous animators in the world (though not well known in the U.S.), and his stop-motion work is absolutely amazing, though a tad on the dark side. This is not Pixar or Disney, certainly.

We watched about a half-dozen of these short pieces with the visiting 12-year-old grandson and, although he allowed as he wasn’t sure at all what they were about (I had warned him this would likely be the case), he was very taken with them. Or led us to believe he was. Who knows with twelve-year-olds? But perhaps this is the role of the grandparent: to astonish, or at least to be memorable or to cause memorable things to happen. (Also to serve a lot of cuisine.)

When he’s forty, he can look back on the visit to the grandparents during which he watched weird Czech animated films and heard about herons eating the frogs and goldfish and saw a bear, right in front of him. You do what you can…