“Stuck without a captain or a chart,
No one seems to know just who to follow anymore;
Hang on…hang on…there’s a twilight, a night-time and a dawn.
Who knows how long? So hang on…hang on.”
Hang On – Guster, from Ganging Up on the Sun
So I hang on and I hang on and I hang on. Now I’ve thrown myself back over to the safe side of the cliff. Is it dawn? There’s light here. Solid ground. And I’m still standing (raking, even, today) in the autumn-chilled sun of mid-November. Andy is helping with Jonah again and it is near bliss to be able to go into the woods and sit or make pictures
…consciously dropping my shoulders, breathing deep the clean forest air. I’d almost forgotten I’d have help again.
Jonah attacked once so far today when he was with Andy, in my car. That safety harness I bought has proven worth its weight in gold. Now Andy’s off to his new job and Jonah’s napping on the big chair in our family room with a Mother Goose book clutched in his hands; I’m stealing a minute here before we go to my mom’s for spaghetti dinner.
Yesterday when I got home I found a reusable green grocery bag on my porch with a card, chicken dinner, black soda, and some other goodies in it…from friends J & Mi (I’ve got a whole periodic table of the elements going on here with my ‘identity protection system’). It is a blessed thing to not have to prepare food, and it is humbling to know that people care. I’m grateful – even as I bitch about our Lifetime TV existence I am grateful.
Andy took Jonah to see Albany’s Veteran’s Day parade on Thursday, and as they were walking from where he’d parked to a decent vantage point, they had to step between two bushes on either side of the path. Andy tells me that a big crow cawed, practically right in Jonah’s ear, and Jonah stopped short in surprise. Then the crow cawed again, and some other birds in the other bush answered, and Jonah just stood there, half-fear and half-fascination on his face. Andy says finally he had to drag Jonah away – that the birds themselves were probably enough of a parade for him.
There’s a fable fit for Aesop in there somewhere: Jonah and the crow.
I guess the actual parade didn’t do much for him, with all its too-loud brass-filled bands and assorted military vehicles & marching veterans. He put his hands over his ears for a lot of it so when there was a break in the action, Andy led him away and back to the car.
Moral of the story: A parade in two bushes is worth one marching down the street.
The Never Normal 