Turn! Turn! Turn!

      In November, 1988, when I was pregnant with my daughter, trying to mingle at Thanksgiving dinner with my husband’s relatives from all over the Eastern seaboard, my father-in-law, Marvin, offered me a glass of wine. I declined, dutifully.

      “Really?” he said. “Not even in a situation like this?” As gregarious as he was, Marvin knew the need for anesthesia when it came to certain family issues. For me it’s not just the relatives; I look at any large gathering with dread. Last year we had a wonderful dinner with just our slightly extended nuclear family. The one person I missed and will again this year is my mom; it’s been thirteen months since she passed away two days before Halloween.

      I used to listen to my transistor radio while lying in bed, using the single earplug to avoid detection. Except for surreptitious listening, I wasn’t being rebellious. I had found a station that played the 40’s music that my mother always raved about: the Inkspots and the Anderson Sisters. I learned about the White Cliffs of Dover lying there. I still enjoy big band music every now and then, especially Glenn Miller. My own music at the time was anything piped out on KFWB: Motown, the Beatles.

      The first I heard of Mick Jagger was in a headline in the LA Times:

“Watch out Beatles, Here Come the Rolling Stones.” I was in about seventh grade. The author wrote something about Jagger’s showmanship on stage, but I didn’t know what that meant. The only dances I knew were the “Monkey” and the ones my mother taught me that involved tracing the outline of an imaginary square on the floor with my feet.

      A year later I was singing “White Rabbit,” trying to imitate Grace Slick, and my mother inadvertently complimented me by saying I sounded like a hippie. Ms. Slick is a white-haired grandma now; after she quit the music business, she said, "all rock-and-rollers over the age of fifty look stupid and should retire."

      Tell that to Keith Richards, who was interviewed on NPR Monday for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stones' first performance. He still plays all the old songs, but never the same way twice. “There’s no de rigueur,” he said, before catching himself and hardening his r’s. “These rifts were built to last a lifetime, and I’m still working on ‘em, you know?”

      It’s easy nowadays to know a previous generation’s music; everything is just floating around, at our fingertips at any moment. Taryn likes “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” but what really gets her excited is Beethoven or Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Sometimes her dad brings out the double base he played in high school.

      Two years ago I wrote a poem when my mother was still healthy and the title was only part of a lyric:

         JUST HOLD ME TIGHT AND TELL ME YOU’LL MISS ME

         In 1968, the year Led Zeppelin

         was born, listening to Mama Cass sing

         Dream a Little Dream

         of Me,

         my mother shook her head

         in inter-generational

         connectedness: “That song was even

         square in my time!”

         Today my son, resembling Edward Scissorhands,

         wonders who Cass Elliot was and further why

         I am especially sad that she died, those

         forty years ago.  When Cass sang,

         her pleasure in the silly,

         sultry melody and rhythms

         infected all of us listening.

         I’ll bet you danced

         the foxtrot to those rhythms,

         Mom, and even twisted your hips

         more than the square pattern required.

One year later, a time to gather stones together.

Mobs

           I’m sitting outside the bookstore at ASU, waiting for my son to finish his internship work for the afternoon. We share a car, and his schedule is tight: out of school at 1:15, work 1:35 to 2:35, soccer practice 3:00–5:00, so I’m chauffeuring for the next couple of months. There’s a nice patio here, with tables, a patterned brick walkway and almost-attractive bright yellow awnings.

          Yellow (gold) is right for Sun Devils, but the designer wasn’t thinking of the color’s natural advertisement for bees. That is bees: the insect that just killed a hiker last week in Camelback Mountain’s Echo Canyon, driving his friends into a cave to wait for rescue, each stung about 300 times. The ones buzzing around here seem more friendly; they so far only nibble at my book and move on. The girl sitting on this bench, however, was driven from the tables when two of the insects became intent upon her caramel Frappicino.

 This guy is next, sitting in her old spot with a delicious-looking watermelon FUZE. It looks like it may be diet, though, so the bees will probably make a swift direct course to the plate of pasta.

Lunches attract the grackles as well, but they are even more polite than the bees, in contradiction to their group behavior. They're boorish when it comes to other birds, at least when they have numbers on their side. 

          Bees swarm when forming a new colony like fish schooling, because a group is protective. When swarming, they're docile. But a colony of africanized bees – the ones that the hikers probably encountered – considers every disturbance the enemy. Bee keepers in South America have learned to work with the Apis mellifera scutellata. It's a heartier variety, though smaller than a European bee. The bees are great honey producers, and with extra smoke and protective gear, they're easily handled.
          Last month, In Myanmar, in only one example of human flash mob violence seen all over the world, peace-loving Rakhine Buddhists burned the houses of neighboring Rohingya Muslims pre-emptively, before the Roohingyas could burn theirs. And visa-versa, until eighty-nine people were killed, 136 injured, and 32,231 made homeless. 
          Why do the bees attack? Because they have learned and relearned, until it is a part of their genetic make up, that every stranger is an enemy. Because they are empowered by their large number. Because they feed on each other's energy until thought is reduced to momentum.  

Possessed

         I get up every weekday morning at 5:30, feed the animals and sprinkle birdseed on my front porch so that Copernicus, my indoor cat, can have an hour’s worth of entertainment from behind the screen door. This morning, in an act of sleep-deprived irony, I sprinkled cat food outside instead. The demons that have muddled my brain certainly have a literal sense of humor: birds are cat food – I get it. I only believe in metaphorical demons, not the Beelzebub kind, although sometimes I wonder about my cat. The camera doesn’t lie:

            Around this time of year I feel kinship with Erika Jong, whose Fear of Flying character realized that her fair-minded Christian/Jewish parents were actually raising her as a druid. My family too, with the same background, goes all out with the nonsectarian aspect of holidays. Halloween has offered us wonderful common ground and similar childhood memories to pass on to our children. We added a Halloween dinner meant to put actual food into the little ones before all that candy, which has now become nearly as mandatory a tradition as Thanksgiving. (My secret recipe for witches’ brew involves dried peas.)

       This year though, everyone is busy and feeling ambivalent about Halloween: so much carving, hanging, digging out of storage, and in our house, cooking—all for one night. Do we really care?

       The answer is yes, as long as Mom (me) does all the work. On Wednesday, with no helpers around, I put out just the minimum of fenced graveyard, lanterns and giant spiders. I discovered that my porch light wasn’t working so I set out extra flameless candles. My son came over with the baby and added a couple of mini strobes; it would have to do.

       Last night I watched Woman is Black, a ghost story with just enough spine-chills and almost no gore. The most frightening parts were the long scenes of continuing dimness with the hero repeatedly disregarding the advice don’t go chasing shadows, and inevitably finding one.

       The trick-or-treaters loved our yard and I loved them – even the teenagers. One of them said to me, “Your house is really scary.” Why? It was simply a long walk through a darkened place with the expectation of something about to happen – which it did, when my sound-activated spider dropped down beside the doorbell. It’s not about fake blood and moving skeletons and monster faces screaming. It’s setting, suspense, and surprise.

Like Woodstock, But With Bats

         Gateway Park lies just north of Luke Air Force Base, a forty-five minute drive from my house in good traffic. The October day is cooling a bit but it’s still bug season on the soccer turf, the moths replacing butterflies at sunset, whirligiging up and down from the field lights. Over at the skate park, the longboarders leap and spin in the same motion, and on the playground an eight-year-old wields a swing like a trapeze. The coach is three feet off the ground at half-time, “There he is,” he shouts to the team, “coming in off the side like gangbusters – what do you do?”

         Everything’s flying here tonight at Gateway, fighter jets roaring

in double-pair sets from Luke, stealthily black against the black sky but at full volume; on the ground we feel that rock-concert thrill of the vibration through our bodies.  We search the sky but see only a faint-blue moving blink. Mostly we see the bats, the glossy silvered membranes of their wings reflecting the lamplight. They flap in loopy maneuvers, honing in on the cyclone of moth wings. A soccer fan beside me brushes the top of her hair rapidly with both hands. “I feel like I walked into a spider web,” she says.

         Why do we still have icky feelings about these honorable little warriors? Without the bats, this ground would have a layer of insects as high as the goalposts. The babies are as photogenic as any mammal, and at least, with the exception of vampire bats, they only drink the bodily fluids of their own species.

                                                                                                            Bat World Sanctuary

         The same is not true for humans, who feed on the milk of our herd animals, prompting paleoanthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harbending (The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution) to call us “mampires.” An early gene mutation gave many European and African human populations the ability to produce lactase in adulthood; before, people stopped making that enzyme after infancy. I can now see even more logic in the barn scene in The Little Vampire.