Mongo is a Brahma bull calf, he is about a week old and loves to play, dance and lick human beings and their clothes. He has a lot of personality and Carol and Ed Gulley love him dearly. He is staying on Bejosh Farm, he will live and work there. Ed and Carol come up to Mongo all day and rub his head, talk to him, feed him, he dances with joy when he sees them.
I got a chill and Maria came up to him and the two just loved each other, oh-my-god I thought, we can’t have a Brahma bull at the farm, but fortunately, the Gulleys mean to keep him. The Gulleys dearly love their animals and you can read about their life on a family farm on their very popular new blog.
I took a bunch of good photos there and will put some of them up tonight and tomorrow. There are few places more fun or interesting to visit than Bejosh Farm. Mongo, named after the monster-man in Blazing Saddles, will be the size of a house trailer when he grows up a bit.
We headed out to see “Captain America,” and on the way, the skies cleared and the sun came out and Maria mumbled something about wanting to garden, and I thought of two-and-a-half hours of explosions and we turned around and headed back to the farm. I’ll go during the week, probably by myself.
So Maria went to garden and we let Chloe and the donkeys out onto the lawn and I set up a guard post to make sure they stayed inside the fence, which is very close to the busy road. It was tough duty, but somebody had to do it.
Fate and Red came over to join me, and I had camera, a Guido Brunetti mystery (by Donna Leon), set in Venice, a bottle of water and a wicker chair from the porch. I was carefully positioned, right in front of the lilac bush which the donkeys love to eat and the portable fence, in case Chloe decided to walk right through it, which she is capable of.
The dogs were happy to take up positions with me, it was windy and the sheep were out in the far pasture, we had just put them there and we were tired, dogs and man. I was vigilant, except when I dosed, mused, drank some water. When the sun came out, it was warm and I loved the wind racing across the fields. The equines have figured out the routine, they show no signs of wanting to leave this grass but we take no chances, we don’t ever leave them out of the pasture unattended.
I gave Fate and Red strict instructions to be vigilant and bark loudly if anybody charged the fence. They watched closely. Border collies understand how to keep moving creatures away from the road.
When it’s time, they all trot happily back inside the gate, they are good creatures. Red sits by the gate to keep the sheep at baby when it is opened. Fate runs to greet everyone and runs circles around them all to make them dizzy.
The equines were happy to graze within the fence, sometimes right by me and the dogs, and I cautioned them to behave, I could be up and out of that chair in a flash. They listened. Maria came over every now and then to check on us while she dug out the garden and turned over the soil and planted some new flowers we got yesterday.
Last year, we were afraid we would lose the farmhouse so we didn’t so much in the way of tending to the grounds or the house. We are happy not to be worried about that this year, and I had a sweet time on guard duty. This work is cut out for me.
I am not a mother, neither is Maria, but we talk often about our mother’s, they are never too far from our conscious selves.
My mother died a long time ago, and I did not see her in the years before she died. I am sorry about that, but I simply couldn’t. I don’t believe I could have survived it, although I wish I had said goodbye to her.
I kept my mother away from my life and my family’s life, I felt I owed them that. I loved my mother, and feared her, she loved me, and that is about as far as I have gotten in thinking about her and in my memories of her.
She was an intelligent, creative, angry and fiercely independent person, she had great love and much rage in her, in roughly equal proportion. She was a powerful force, but she always believed in me, and fiercely.
She was the first person in the world to tell me I was a writer, I told great stories, and that shaped my creative life. She was also restless and unhappy in a terrible marriage.
Mother’s Day is not a happy day for me, but a day of reflection and understanding. And reconciliation, I think.
She was born in the wrong time, men seemed to undermine her life at every turn, especially her husband, and she could never quite carve out the life she wanted and fought for and deserved. There was just no support or encouragement for that then, and it made her bitter, sometimes hateful.
Today, there is no point re-hashing the painful parts of her, I am past that, deeply into my own life and fully responsible for it. On this day, I think of all the mothers in the world, how hard they work, how much they love, how difficult their task is to be a mother and also live in our complex world.
I think of my mother, and all of the mothers today, I hope it is a meaningful and loving day for you.
The new Marvel comic-inspired movie “Captain America” is out, to generally loving reviews. It is two and a half-hours long, and it is supposed to reflect the divisiveness and intensity of our political years. I’m going to see it this afternoon, I groaned for several years about the gargantuan, loud and plot-challenged genre of comic book movies, but they have grown on me.
Like the country, I have evolved culturally and I find these movies long, fun and something much more thoughtful than I imagined. So I’ll go to see this one and write about it. Yesterday, a long-time blog reader messaged me to say she was having a conflict with a fellow member of her church over Donald Trump.
“It started, of course,” she wrote, “with a comment on Facebook, and things got out of hand (she does not care for Mr. Trump) and her friend – we’ll call her Judy – called their pastor, rather than her, because she didn’t think the two of them talk about it.
“We had a meeting last night,” she wrote, “with me feeling a bit like a 2nd grader being called into the principal’s office because of a playground squabble.” She couldn’t understand why the woman would not contact her, but “this woman is a rabid Trump supporter and I am open and honest about criticizing him.”
Judy’s feeling were hurt, she said, because she criticized Trump so strongly.
The story made an impression on me, as I have gotten many similar messages, from people who support Donald Trump and people who don’t. Especially after I wrote about learning to live with conflict, something many of us will be familiar with before this year is out. If this is happening in a church community between two people who obviously care for one another, I can only imagine what’s ahead. My column, she said, helped her “to see things more clearly from this woman’s perspective and I am grateful for that.”
It was a lovely and honest message to get.
I will be thinking about this issue for some time I imagine. Donal Trump is, by choice and admission, a divisive figure. So we are divided.
In the interests of openness, I need to say that I can’t vote for Donald Trump, it doesn’t matter what he says from now on, I doubt I’ll be able to forget what he has already said about women and Mexicans and immigrants and mass deportations and families.
Many people, including those born Jewish or into other conflicts and butchery, process talk of mass deportations and expulsions in a particular way, it is never simply a political argument in a debate. For many people, in many different countries, at many different times, it was all too real.
Still, I will also understand that everyone processes ideas differently, and no one should be the prisoner of my experience, or even of their own. We all have to look in the mirror in the morning and like what we see. I have already lost a friend or two simply because I wrote that I planned to vote for Hilary Clinton. In our country right now, we seem to need to hate what we disagree with, an awful fever.
I am not much of a hater, I don’t plan to hate Donald Trump or the people who support him, I imagine that he, like Mrs. Clinton, think they are doing the right thing, and believe they are doing the best they can. And I don’t plan to argue with people about their choices, surely not on Facebook or by e-mail. That is a poison unto itself.
In our culture, stating a political preference, no matter how gently, is considered heinous, I am used to it, and will certainly not be deterred by it. I am not writing as a political advocate, I have no need to tell you what to think or to be told what to think. I don’t care to hear who you hate or don’t hate, it is not really my business.
We are all responsible for what we do and decide, I consider the process to be personal. This is part of learning how to live in our world, the path to enlightenment.
I have this instinct that this year will be healthy in a number of ways, despite the hysteria of the media. Democracy is neither pretty or neat, and it is far better to rage on Facebook than run through the streets with torches. Many people are unhappy and resentful, and many have good reasons, and my plan is to stick with my instincts and convictions while doing the best to understand the passions of others, just like my reader has done.
If I inspired her, she inspired me.
So off to see what Captain America has to say about this, and perhaps it will be fun also. Maybe I will come home with some sushi at the new Japanese restaurant down the road. If it seems worth it, I’ll write a review.
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, writes Richard Dawkins, we have finally opened our eyes on a “sumptuous” planet, sparkling with color, beautiful with life. Within decades, we must close our eyes again. It isn’t a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, he writes, “to work at understanding the universe and how we wake up to it? This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often- why I bother to get up in the mornings.”
