Month: November 2018

November 28, 2018

Reminder of Logan Circle

This afternoon in the sauna I was chatting with a friend about pets and commented that the only pet I’ve had in the past sixty years was a parrot in the late 70’s in DC—while I was living in the Four Belles at Logan Circle. Its name was Lorro, which is Spanish for “parrot” and a masculine noun.  However, we called it “she,” though Lorro never laid any eggs…  It’s not always easy to determine the gender of a bird, especially a yellow-headed Amazonian.

Yellow-headed Amazonian (like my parrot Lorro)

Lorro was originally my housemate Charles’ pet, but he had a way of losing interest in his whims and wound up giving me the bird, so to speak. It proved to be very little work being a parrot-master as long as I kept the food coming, and she was pleasant company hanging around on her cage in the parlor in the round bay by our ancient (unplayable) Bechstein piano.  Lorro had a penchant for talking to herself.

According to Charles, she was raised in a simple Mexican family, which made sense because Lorro had a whole routine of a crying baby and a concerned mother trying to calm it with a lullaby (in Spanish). In addition, she’d sing snatches of Mexican revolutionary songs apparently learned from the radio.  Over time the lyrics got a bit garbled.

I guess my voice was too low for Lorro to care for, but she quickly learned to laugh (giggle) just like me. It was weird to be in the dining room and hear myself burst into peals of laughter in the parlor.  She also had an unnerving talent for mimicking the veritable symphony of sirens one heard every night there in our epicenter of the slum, now epicenter of chic.  She was right on key doing the sirens of the police, fire-engines, and ambulances, and with my laughter mixed in, it sounded rather mad.

Unfortunately, Lorro was a bit developmentally disabled. For some reason she never grew true flight feathers in her wings, and what tried to grow, she assiduously pulled out.  Vets said there was nothing we could do…  That’s why she just hung around on her cage, singing, laughing, and blaring her sirens.  Sometimes I’d take her out riding on my bicycle:  As we rolled down the avenue, she’d sit on the basket and flap her stubby wings, shrieking at the top of her lungs.

I think it was the fall of 1979 when Charles went on an extended trip round the ruins of Guatemala. While he was away, I got up one morning to find Lorro lying on the parlor floor as dead as a doornail.  Assuming she’d had a heart attack or some such, I mourned and tried to figure out what to do with her corpse till Charles’ return from the jungles (which, by the way, played a large role in his manic “nervous breakdown” that winter).

The solution I came up with was to wrap her gently in plastic wrap and put her in the freezer. To be thorough, I also put the book on parrot care in there with her.  When Charles got back, he didn’t want to deal with funerals and anyway quickly proceeded to lose his mind.  Over the next year we wound up having to sell the Four Belles, and the new owners inherited a frozen parrot and book on parrot care.  I often wonder what they thought when they opened that freezer.

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November 12, 2018

Balthazar’s Seven Redeeming Virtues

After recently carrying on about the majority of humanity being possessed by demons (the seven deadly sins), I got to wondering about that minority of folks who aren’t. Probably under the influence of my early Catholic upbringing, I think they’re the virtuous ones.

Since my catechism lessons had always concentrated on the sins and said very little about virtue, I had to Google virtuous qualities and was surprised to find a wide range of lists with varying numbers of items. Pope Gregory counted seven; another scholarly opinion figures eight; the catechism lists four cardinal virtues; Buddhists and Bushido (Samurai) teach seven differing ones; the Stoics (Aristotle, Plato, etc.) consider four; general theology lists only three; and the Sikhs and Confucius offer five in different sets.

There was lots of overlap and redundancy in the several lists. I threw them all into a semantic blender, and the seven categories that settled out were most similar to Gregory’s. While that Pope was a whiz with his calendar revision and new style of chanting, his philosophy was less than rigorous, and his seven virtues really boil down to only five.

In my agnostically authoritative list I’ve added in parentheses all the definitions, synonyms, aspects, and corollaries that I could pull out of my vocabulary. You might easily think of more to add, but I bet you won’t find a new category.  If you do, please let me know!

Here then are Balthazar’s Seven Redeeming Virtues:

CHARITY (Generosity, Sacrifice, Altruism, Philanthropy, Helpfulness, Sharing)

COMPASSION (Patience, Kindness, Love, Mercy, Sympathy, Tolerance)

COURAGE (Diligence, Fortitude, Confidence, Valor, Perseverance, Hope, Initiative)

HUMILITY (Honor, Respect, Modesty, Renunciation, Gratitude, Contentment)

HONESTY (Justice, Sincerity, Fidelity, Truth, Faith, Integrity)

MODERATION (Temperance, Chastity, Morality, Self-discipline, Prudence)

PERSPICACITY (Wisdom, Insight, Discernment, Understanding, Perceptive)

Humility Redeems All Species.

Apart from Humility being the best antidote for Pride and Courage curing Sloth, the rest of these virtues are a great medical cocktail for treating the other deadly sins. But how can we convince the demon-possessed majority to acknowledge their addictions and take their medicine?  If only there were some way to inoculate folks with Honesty and Compassion, a pill to take for Charity and Moderation, or an operation that would activate the Perspicacity gland!

I’ve seen a poster that exhorts: TEACH TOLERANCE!  But I’m not sure one can actually teach virtues.  Obviously, the deadly sins can be taught though.  They are modelled and encouraged by our economic system, by the entertainment and advertising industries, and in almost all our personal and political relationships.  Sadly, virtues don’t sell well nowadays, and folks who practice them are mostly seen as boring do-gooders—or naïve fools.

And about virtue being its own reward: I don’t buy that old saw.  I sincerely believe that the reward of virtue is peace and joy.  At least that’s why I try to practice it.

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November 5, 2018

Hog Heaven

In my previous blog post I mentioned my prize-winning Poland China hog named Cornpone (the Magnificent), which made me a bit sentimental about pigs. So I went to my archive of photos and pulled out the snapshot I took of him dated September 28, 1957.

Cornpone, Champion Poland China hog, 1957

Oddly, after these 61 years the Kodacolor print has taken on the true color of the subject, a magenta-toned sepia. It lends the memory a certain monumentality.  He is standing by his trough in which I would dump a daily bucket of slops (scraps from our truck stop café across the highway) and mix nice messes of special mash to make him fat.

Cornpone’s pen was a good-sized area next to that for Daddy’s twelve brindle hunting hounds. The picture was taken from the edge of his wallow in the foreground.  I’d also bring buckets of water every day to keep it suitably muddy, and he’d loll around in the muck, grunting and snorting.  That’s where I learned the truth of the old saw “happy as a pig in hot mud.”

We kept our herd of several hogs (the pinker variety) in a pen down past the pasture at the edge of the woods—where their stench couldn’t reach up to the house or yard. It was also my exhausting duty to haul many buckets of slops to them each day and to keep their wallow wet.

Periodically we’d slaughter maybe three of the herd at a time, and neighbor folks from around helped with the hot and heavy work. First, Daddy would lean over the fence with his rifle and shoot a hog between the eyes.  It would drop like a rock.  Then he’d jump in and slit its throat, letting the blood run into the wallow.

A few of the men would drag the carcass out of the pen and up the hill to where some huge iron pots were boiling on wood fires. They’d haul the hog up on ropes over a tree limb and lower it into the boiling water for a moment to scald the hair off.  Then they’d hang it up from another branch for the butchering.

When they’d spit the stomach open, I was always grossed out by the cascade of guts but had to help with sorting out the intestines for sausage-casings. Brandishing great knives, they’d toss slabs of hog-fat into another iron pot to render out the lard and make chitlings (pork rinds).

The butchering would take most of a day, and it was quite a community party. We’d wrap up the cuts of hams, loins, and so on to put in our big walk-in cooler, and folks would take turns on the big grinder making sausage.  The neighbors were happy to get shares of the meat and buckets of lard for their work.  And we had loads of fresh pork to sell in the café.

Cornpone didn’t share the rustic fate of our common hogs. That fall we took him to the Sevier County Fair in DeQueen, Arkansas, where he won the Blue Ribbon.  After his big win, he went to a more sophisticated hog heaven.  Being a simple country boy of fifteen, I sold my champion hog to a meatpacker and bought myself a pair of cowboy boots with turquoise tops.  My young feet outgrew them within a year.

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November 2, 2018

Gem of Wisdom #100

To celebrate this one-hundredth posting on my blog, I offer another gem of wisdom for what it’s worth to the many millions who don’t read my postings.

I’m not one given to thumping on the holy books of any sect, except for plagiarizing the Aztec codices, but that’s a matter of art. However, I keep thinking of the biblical parable of demonic possession because it seems particularly cogent nowadays.

From my naïve (and eccentric) position, it sure looks to me like the majority of the human race is possessed by demons. Those evil spirits are easily named as the traditional seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth—and all the synonyms and corollaries under each…  These behaviors are deadly not only to the perpetrator but also to everybody else.  Infection by even one of them is like poison in a well.  Complexes, which are frighteningly frequent (and painfully apparent in certain public figures!), are especially lethal.  By the way, I’m talking here about the whole world.

So what happens in the biblical parable? The demons are exorcised, i.e., driven out, into a herd of undeserving swine that stampedes off a cliff into the sea and drowns.  Nice way to dispose of trash, I guess, but nowadays we don’t have that technology.  And I don’t believe in scape-hogs.

These Little Pigs

[This photo of cute little piggies is lifted from www.swarkansasnews.com in appreciation for it coming from Nashville, a civilized town quite close to my childhood home in the woods where I had all my Neolithic dentistry done.  And in memory of my prize-winning shoat, a Poland China hog named Cornpone the Magnificent.  He earned me the title of 4-H County Champion Boy!]

Even without swine to drown the evil spirits, our demon-ridden humans are obviously, but obliviously, stampeding headlong over economic, ecological, and spiritual cliffs. Unfortunately, their suicide may well kill off virtuous humans too, not to mention other life-forms on earth.  Let’s hope at least the innocent pigs survive.  Their intelligent brains might eventually evolve into sentience, and one might even boldly go where no pig has gone before!

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