Prose Nonfiction Archives - almost everything is unexpected.

Rabbits! Rabbits!

While I was browsing the used book shelves today a thought spontaneously evanesced (as they do) and I found myself asking: is it too late to say Rabbits! Rabbits! Rabbits!? No, I decided. Talking to the cats doesn’t count; they are not people, even if I speak to them like they were. This recitation trick, that my paternal grandmother of a rural upbringing embedded in my brain from the age of seven, rewards the speaker with good luck all month if and only if they say aloud ‘rabbits! rabbits! rabbits! before speaking to anybody on the first day of each month. Speaking to animals or yourself doesn’t count (that’s my gloss.)

Most months I remember to unlock the secret to good fortune, which in itself is remarkable since my grandmother stopped reminding me when her own luck ran out in 1985. Some months, like this one – March 2023 – I do remember, but too late. Either I’ve already spoken to another human being – the bus driver, my neighbour, a work colleague who also happens to have decided to come to the office that day – and so accept, with some regret, the futility of trying to cheat fate or, like today, I get the day wrong. Only sitting here, in the evening of March the second, do I now realise looking at my desktop calendar that my rabbits! ran a day late. Sincerely, I chastise myself, for a moment anyway.

What can I expect now? A month’s days of irksome ill-fortune? Late wakings, spilled drinks, missed buses, poorly-judged emojis and flapping shoelaces? The fact that these thoughts even occur is embarassing (thoughts that ‘just occur’ tend that way). I’m objective, rational, not given to organising my affairs according to, or even with a liminal nod to, time-interwoven superstitious tendencies (I claim).

Something more serious? Probably not. Actuarially: unlikely. But then again, one could definitely classify avoiding death or serious injury as good luck. That’s inarguable, we can agree; but devilishly hard to prove, in a causative sense. Stuff doesn’t happen all the time, it just doesn’t get clicks. The human gait is a controlled fall; we are one neurological hiccup away from a visit to the accident ward each time we lurch into perambulation – one second or less in our conscious awareness behind our brain’s grip on the reins (free will is an illusion: discuss).

So why do I recite (or try to remember to) on the first day of each month: rabbits! rabbits! rabbits!? Well, luck (or trepidation at the prospect of not renewing my subscription to the avoidance of bad luck), isn’t it. Traditions are triggers: reminders (if we really wanted or needed them) that we are mere synapses in the collective nervous system of all conscious life: conduits for signals – of the most miniscule and universal frequency. When I say rabbits! each month I see my grandmother’s smiling face, I see us picking raspberries in July, playing dominoes on Sunday, roaring fires and solemn chiming mantelpiece clocks. I give voice to time passing, to life branching and branching. Luck is being part of the tree.

My sister died.

I don’t have time to say it all now. She was my older, only sibling. I’d had no contact with her in many years. She lived a very different life to mine. And now she is dead. I’ll find a quiet few hours – perhaps a Sunday afternoon – to better reflect on it. But it’s important to declare how I think I feel about it. Yes, how I think I feel about her death. Because it seems to me that there are really two kinds of response to news of a death in the family. First, there is the nervous, involuntary response: waves of nausea that roll up from the solar plexus leaving your body wrung out like a rag and your mind released from inhibition in a delirium of grief. And then there is the deliberative response (triggered by asking: what do I feel? how should I feel?), that is called up by nature and orthodoxy, and hangs around until it is either satisfied or fades away from neglect. If the first doesn’t happen, then surely the latter must, because the alternative is to feel nothing at all. So how do I feel about her death, and what should I feel? These I must try to answer for, having also lost – as a teenager – a father from whom I was also estranged, the more difficult question of what ‘family’ means to me begs at least an attempt at an answer.

The Street is Their Stage (Gambit Magazine, New Orleans)

The crowds stopping traffic on Decatur Street speak for themselves. Passers-by might glimpse a baton in mid-flight, or a streak of flames bursting into the air.

In Jackson Square itself, the milling crowds take their pick from jazz bands, break dancers and unicyclists. Occupying street corners and vacant podiums, the mimes work miracles with their lithe bodies and unworldly expressions. Clowns mesmerise children with balloon tricks only the under fives can understand.

Jose Eduardo Tama is one of the more recognisable street entertainers in the city. His one-man act that encompasses magic, juggling, comedy and theatre regularly draws the two or three hundred people needed to fill the small, half-moon fountain area near the Moonwalk on Decatur Street. For him, New Orleans has been the perfect base from which to practice his art. Its well-educated blend of tropical and European influences gives him the freedom to develop his talent and at the same time pursue a career as a painter.

Jose came to New Orleans four years ago, to escape the stresses of life in New York, his home town. Although he makes many trips to perform at arts festivals in Europe and the U.S., he considers New Orleans his permanent home. For the more talented street performers, New Orleans streets provide the exposure needed to move on to the more lucrative contacts, such as commercials and private bookings. But in a town where ‘lagniappe’ is the password for anything that doesn’t require an invoice, a town made famous for ‘The Greatest Free Show on Earth’ it must be a matter of some diplomacy to actually profit from what some would be surprised to learn is often a full-time career.

Jose has his money pitches handled. His years of experience have built a stockpile of ‘pay me’ approaches. “Remember, ladies and gentlemen, the more money you give, the more money I have. I’ve given you all I can give you. Now you owe me .” When you’re asking people to show you the colour of their money in public, comedy is essential. As Jose points out, performing on city streets is no free stage. Jose and friends pay $74 annually for a permit to operate.

Even with a permit, life as a street entertainer is not always fun and games. In a city renowned for its liberating atmosphere, performers often find that heckling comes easily. More than once Jose has packed up early because of persistent yells from a gathering of those who have too much to drink. There are also those rules to be followed: one performer, Jose recalled, once spent the night in jail after being arrested in mid-juggle. On one occasion Jose was even asked to move on by a high-ranking member of the church because his audience was too loud. And them of course, there’s the inevitable rain.

In an area such as the French Quarter, however, where almost all events except eating take place on the streets, such small problems don’t prevent the continuous flow of touring musicians and troubadours eagerly seeking fame, fortune and an alternative lifestyle. The French Quarter remains one of the top three locations in the country for street performers. Only San Francisco and New York can rival New Orleans’ impromptu stages and eager audiences.

Throughout the coming months, and again again in the fall, the French Quarter will be the site for a whole spectrum of entertainment lost to a generation of couch-potatoes. Carnival passes, but the parade continues.

Ebb Tide (2001)

There’s a town in North Wales I remember well. The Dovey River comes down from Snowdonia, winds gently through the coastal hills, and greets the Straits of Man in a wide, flat estuary called an aher in Welsh. The town of Aberdovey sits snug in a cove against the hills – dozing slate giants mantled with a thin layer of earth to make the walking easier. When the tide ebbs and tips the little boats on their sides, the rippled beach, cratered with ponds, stretches out to meet the bar – almost too far away to see.

Our house was at the very tip-top of Gibraltar Terrace – past the butcher’s and the little shop that sold News of the World and fresh milk in bottles. It wasn’t really a lane, Gibraltar Terrace, but more a vertiginous path cobbled with stone and high-walled on both sides. It wound upward, ever upward, to the little cottage perched on a cliff, with the red door and the shroud of wild roses that grew wilder every year.

In a wooden box in the attic of the cottage at the top of Gibraltar Terrace was my collection of holiday toys. Every July since I was five this box awaited my arrival, and every year the contents became larger and more respectable. There were figurine soldiers, and personnel carriers, and scale-model trucks; there were bright-orange crab lines – tangled and reeking of brine- and little wooden frames to wrap them around; there were spades for digging and buckets for dredging, and wire-framed nets for interesting things the tide left behind.

It rarely rained in Aberdovey in the summer but when it did the box held cards to play, and a game called Pairs that one day I rigged so expertly I never lost a set until I was twenty-one. There was a toy shop in the town that was open ’til six, the kind of shop that – come July – burst its bud with beach balls and kites and bathing towels and racks and rows of snowshakers and shell beads – all tagged with lurid green labels that grew more ragged as the summer, and the beach-sticky fingers of children wore on.

On certain days the beach became a battleground, where grey armies of the Wehrmacht, retreating over the beach blanket, succumbed to the superior forces of the British desert army who, being buff coloured like the sand, always returned to the box fewer than before. When the fighting was done, the bucket and spade came out, and the limbs of slumbering parents would disappear beneath mounds of shovelled sand. Then the yellow bulldozer – my favourite – a miniature replica with real rubber tires and a tiny man behind the controls. Under my gaze it grew to full size until I forgot myself and became the driver, ploughing industriously through golden sand, ploughing around the legs of giants, ploughing past thermos flasks the size of lighthouses. At low tide, the little man and his yellow dozer journeyed out to the water line where the sand was wet and pliable, and raised grand castles on the bar.

When the world turned on its axis, and the mussel-crusted pier sank low in the water I would go crabbing – with my line, my bucket and a packet of meat from Griffith the butcher. Crabbing was man’s business and required the best tackle money could buy. There was an assortment of weights in the box – rings of lead with nodules that served some purpose I never discovered – and blue steel hooks wrapped in neat, wax paper bags. On a good day my bucket bristled with blue-backed crabs. It was very nice to peer in occasionally, and watch them blowing tiny bubbles, climbing over one another and making a crackling noise like pocket pebbles. When the time came to go home, I’d pick them out with my small, careful hands and watch as they floated back down into the greeny briny gloom.

Nineteen seventy-two was the year the yellow bulldozer, with its real rubber tires and articulated bucket, did not return to the box that went back in the attic on the second Sunday after our arrival. It stayed on the beach, buried in the same hole its driver had dug and then abandoned. I try to explain to myself, even now, how I could have lost my yellow bulldozer. At what point did my imagination falter? At what point did my grip on that busy little dozer loosen just enough to let it go, to leave it behind in the sand? The next year, on the first morning after our arrival, instead of pulling down the wooden box in the attic, I went sailing with my father. All afternoon I roamed the exposed sands, half-heartedly searching for my yellow bulldozer with its little man inside. But the search was in vain.

Goodbye Jack.

Attendant upon death, particularly that of a relative, a close friend or a pet, are the rituals and learned behaviours designed cleverly to distract us from the horror of death – and especially the unattributable cruelty of premature death – that get us through those first few hours and days. Those first few hours and days. The brutal, butcher’s rendering of our reality’s comfortably-aligned fabric that we cannot possibly turn away from; the chasm that opens before us; the recorded fact confronted, that reaches out impertinently and slaps us in the face, again and again, leaving our salted skin reddened and raw. The answer will not come, will never come, and yet we must ask, again and again: why? why him, or her? Why now?

On September the 24th, a cloudy Tuesday morning, I finally gathered Jack in my arms, his remaining front leg lolled over my shoulder. I’d had to drag him from under the bed where he’d retreated spooked by his preserving instinct. Under the bed; always the last resort, inevitably.

We imitate the professional insouciance of our vet – compassionate but efficient. We muffle our ears from the voice that tells us, stop! We pull shelves aways from walls, we drag furniture aside, lift chairs and reach behind sofas. We are sheep shearers, cattle prodders, heartless cullers, late-for-school chastising parents. Finally, we are the bailiffs of death and our pain does not spare us from the irrascibility of impatience. We want this all to be over.

Jack feels heavy in the carrier as we walk the half-mile to the vet’s clinic. The carrier rocks back and forth as I walk. Bumpy ride for Jack. Then the thought, Jack is a bag of bones compared to three weeks ago. His vertebrae are countable, his haunches are hollowed out. I’d convinced myself he had a kidney disease, or some hormonal imbalance Google said was common to felines. He does have one leg less than he had a year ago. Cancer had dissolved his femur at the shoulder. We’d gone through the drama of amputation and recovery – and then the expatriation and beginning a new life in a new country – but his long term prognosis wasn’t certain. Of course it wasn’t. Every day I woke to Jack’s eyes – sleepy and green – staring into mine, inches away, imploring breakfast, was the confirmation I needed that death can be eradicated from consciousness if only one feels enough, tries hard enough, for long enough.

At the clinic my attention always lingers momentarily upon the clean, stainless-steel examining table. The space between examination and autopsy can so quickly collapse. Cold steel. Jack turned to look at me as the vet squeezed his mid-section and winced. Cold, clinical steel. That animal you’re squeezing now, like a bag, I recall the very day I brought him home and opened the cardboard carrier box given by the shelter, watching him emerge, cautiously, tiny and wide-eyed with that soft, kitten sheen, thrust into a sensory wilderness in my unproven care. The steel examining table. He turned his head and gave me a look – a certain stare. And wanting (expecting?) to think that, at that moment especially, he was communicating something to me alone, I looked back and I thought, Jack is asking asking me: when can we we go home? I’m really not enjoying this.

The next half hour passed in what seems now a state of unseemly haste. Indoctrinated into the veterinary creed, I concurred with the prognosis. Nothing more to be done. We could take this approach but of course…. quality of life, inevitable, likelihood, months maybe, suffering, prolongation. Better to… . It’ll be quick and painless. Would I like to hold him?

A pinprick in the rump and after perhaps thirty seconds Jack exhaled, heavily and noisily, and was still. I waited to watch his chest rise again, but it lay flat. And there it is. There, he was. Our journey together at an end. For Jack, no more. Never more. Jack was, like us all, a tiny spark ejected from the universal fire. I was unprepared. It didn’t yet make sense. As if it could: the excision of life, the bridge to love, sense and graspable meaning. With the tick of a clock’s hand, delight in body warmth and slowly blinking eyes passed into a future of memories and shelved photos.

I walked home, blubbing, shamed by the flimsy, now empty carrier. It’s another morning in the neighbourhood; the world is unmoved by the commonplace horror of another death, and my beloved, three-legged Jack with three black dots on his toes, will no more be in need of his breakfast.