Farm News 05-20-07

Goslings

Jesse, my part-time teenage helper, has moved his goslings into one of my rearing pens. First he put the smallest two in a brooder box where they would be nice and warm. They were very unhappy in there and I was concerned they might not live. I called Jesse and he came over as soon as school was out that day to take a look at them. We took them out and put them in a sunny spot with nice green grass where they immediately started to eat a bit. Geese, if you didn't know, are primarily grass eaters.

After eating some grass they looked better but were still obviously unhappy babies. I tried to explain to Jesse that they needed a mommy and that he should hold them in his lap for a while and talk to them. After about ten minutes of sitting in Jesse's lap while he talked to them they perked up and started acting like healthy young goslings. Little geese need some attention from mommy every day or they don't do well. Now that they know they have a mommy who loves them they are probably doubling their weight every ten days.

No Farm News Recently

Unable to find the source of the problem with internet connectivity, I went on a patriarch's inspection tour to examine young Julian for acceptance into the family. My daughter and her husband are discovering that having a baby isn't all fun and games. Julian is demanding food every two hours around the clock and then all four grandparents show up at about the same time. The grandparents all wanted to hold him and pass him around while warbling and cooing, which made him cranky and upset. That is the way it is with new babies.

There could have been terrible clashes between grandparents wanting to hold Julian while he slept, fussed, and defecated, but no such disturbances occurred. The grandmothers did most of the baby holding, of course. I hefted him a few times, but generally I prefer reading about babies to holding them. I find children more interesting when they are fifteen, although when Julian reaches that age I will be 85 years old.

Spring, 1957

Many Saturday nights in 1957 found me in a little bar in Paris, a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe and then a half block left, on the right side of the street, drinking French beer, the flavor of which resembled two day old dishwater, and listening to Jerry Lee Louis on the juke box. It was the only place in Paris at that time with a juke box of American Rock and Roll, the real stuff, with duck-tail haircuts left lying on the floors of Army barber shops. Last week, Cypress Avenue, a Rock and Roll program produced in Kansas City, featured the music of the late 1950's. It lifted me right up and took me back to Paris, even though I hadn't ingested any kind of mind-altering drugs for weeks.

Last night, Saturday night, I used a mind-altering drug, gin, and decided to write about Paris in 1957, the year Elvis came to Germany in the U.S. Army, and some time after Earnest Hemingway left. It was hard to get laid in Paris unless you wanted to pay-for-it, and paying-for-it depleted the amount of money left to purchase beer, the mind-altering drug of choice at that time, so I spent most of my time in a nameless bar, drinking beer with strange people; very strange people, in fact, for whom the word 'metrosexual' was eventually coined.

I was only twenty years old, but, somehow, I had already realized that there existed a small population of people who, if summed in an adding machine, would yield the sum of vision, and that the remainder of the population if summed in the same adding machine would yield delusion. That bar was a gathering place for those who, though individually broken scraps, could occasionally pass through a pattern, like flecks of paper in a whirlwind, which contained truth; normally, though, we were all too drunk to notice.

Solange LeCoq was usually there on Saturday nights, or, to be more accurate, arriving between 2:00 and 3:00 am on Sunday mornings. She always dressed in black. Solange didn't speak English, and I didn't yet speak French. Nevertheless, we became lovers within a month of our first exchange of mutually unintelligible vocalizations. I became a very happy camper, even though five days of the week I was camping with a few thousand other guys in a mud hole called the Braconne Ordnance Depot. Actually, I was only happy when making love with Solange, and for maybe ten minutes afterward, then I reverted to generally crazy but with my eye on a hope for the future.

The music of Jerry Lee Lewis was a part of clear vision. Solange was a gateway to a universe on the other side of insanity. Was choosing Jerry Lee Lewis, while making love to Solange, an act of cowardice, ignorance, or enlightenment? The choice, I am afraid, was between cowardice and ignorance, and the only objective choice was 'both'. Did such choices exist anytime other than 1957, in Paris?

Who was it? Ernest Hemingway? William Burroughs? Lawrence Durrell? Me?? We were in a sidewalk café having coffee and a brioche. Solange said my name, and then gasped; I realized she was having an orgasm. Then she said, huskily, “One of my former lovers is across the street, standing in a doorway, watching us. I am spreading my thighs and teasing him. Isn't Paris wonderful in the Spring?” At least that was what I thought she was saying.

Later, Jerry Lee Louis was using piano and voice to create A Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On, Solange still had the question in her eyes, and I was still trying to figure out what season of the year it was.

Very late that night we stood beneath the Tour d'Eiffel, glowing in the reflections of the lights shining on the tower. We placed a park chair carefully in the center of the base of the Eiffel Tower. I undid my belt and trousers, letting them fall to my ankles, and sat down. Solange pulled down her panties, kicked them off , moved to me, and lowered herself onto me.

That is the sort of experience one can remember fifty years later. Sex, under the world's largest phallic symbol. I was drivin' my Chevy to the levee and we didn't even know it, yet.