miracles and an octopus
Right around four-thirty, I habitually break out some onions and garlic, flip on NPR, and chop while I listen to the news. This has not happened for a long time. We have soccer every night of the school week bar Friday, Martin works from home now and often cooks and we usually end up gulping dinner as a family at 4:30 before rushing into a flurry of shin guards, cleats, and water bottles. I miss my little routine but I don't really miss listening to the news. I keep up by reading The Week--though, by the last page, I often submerse the depression and sense of hopelessness I feel seeping into me by watching Frasier or Doc Martin before bed.
I have always been a faithful listener to NPR, but lately I've been falling off, not because I don't love the soothing voices of Meechelle Norris and Robert SEAgull, but because the news is overwhelming, either about the nitty-grit of the presidential race or the horribly awful things happening around the world. One night on the way back from soccer practice, as we coasted down a road trimmed on either side by dense, towering evergreens, Heather flipped the dial on the radio. Meechelle: "Tonight, in what has been the bloodiest day. . ." My sister reached down in a characteristic lightning reflex and flipped it off.
"I have a great long list of people who deserve to sit in a long time-out," I told Martin that night. Why can't the Great Mother pinch them by the shoulders, lead them to a plastic chair, and command them to sit out a while and think about what they're doing?
So yesterday, when I took my nieces and Bea down to the Marine Science Museum on the shore of Liberty Bay, I was enchanted by the news story I saw posted to the bulletin board there. The girls had already shaken sticky tentacles with the sea anemone; we'd seen a rare silver mama fish (only to be found in this part of the world) that actually gives live birth (and the male turns black as pitch while mating--also fascinating) and we'd stared down a crab or two, but they were sad to see the octopus was gone. The Science Center usually nurtures an octopus and he, or she, is the star attraction of the museum, but today the tank was empty.
Octopi are incredibly smart creatures. Maybe it's that enormous cranium that gives them the edge on simpler sea animals, but Chris, my marine-biologist cousin, once told me a story about the lab's octopus clambering out of her tank, galloomphing across the tile floor, helping herself to the delicacies in the far tank, and then returning back to her own tank where she acted all casual the next morning. Unfortunately she'd left a incriminating, watery trail behind.
So this--our propsenity as humans to love smart creatures, and to love the creatures we nurse back to health--helps me understand how the director of Poulsbo's Marine Science Center could have fallen in love with Mr. Bob, an enormous red octopus with an alarming display of suckers on his legs. Mr. Bob joined the folks at the center, underweight and stressed, some months ago, but they faithfully fed him bits and pieces until he was a whopping 50 plus pounds. And then they let him go in the bay again. There's a photo in the news article of the director and a volunteer, brows knitted in concentration, lowering Mr. Bob in a big blue tub into the bay; one strawberry-colored tentacle hangs lazily over the side. But the photo that made me appreciate the news media again was on the front page of the article: the bearded director, clad in black wet suit, bobs on the water, holding a monster octopus' bright red head in his hands. He's kissing his friend goodbye, right on that bumpy, weird-eyed cranium.
That bizarre, touching image was enough to ignite my faith in the idiosyncratic goodness of humans again, and by the time we were picnicking in the park and a seal bobbed his slick head up to peer at us, miracles seemed like part of dailiness again. A silver fish that gives birth to live young; a love story between a bearded man and an octopus; a beautiful seal that swims up to picnickers and disappears again, as if the wonderful is just something that happens everyday.
I have always been a faithful listener to NPR, but lately I've been falling off, not because I don't love the soothing voices of Meechelle Norris and Robert SEAgull, but because the news is overwhelming, either about the nitty-grit of the presidential race or the horribly awful things happening around the world. One night on the way back from soccer practice, as we coasted down a road trimmed on either side by dense, towering evergreens, Heather flipped the dial on the radio. Meechelle: "Tonight, in what has been the bloodiest day. . ." My sister reached down in a characteristic lightning reflex and flipped it off.
"I have a great long list of people who deserve to sit in a long time-out," I told Martin that night. Why can't the Great Mother pinch them by the shoulders, lead them to a plastic chair, and command them to sit out a while and think about what they're doing?
So yesterday, when I took my nieces and Bea down to the Marine Science Museum on the shore of Liberty Bay, I was enchanted by the news story I saw posted to the bulletin board there. The girls had already shaken sticky tentacles with the sea anemone; we'd seen a rare silver mama fish (only to be found in this part of the world) that actually gives live birth (and the male turns black as pitch while mating--also fascinating) and we'd stared down a crab or two, but they were sad to see the octopus was gone. The Science Center usually nurtures an octopus and he, or she, is the star attraction of the museum, but today the tank was empty.
Octopi are incredibly smart creatures. Maybe it's that enormous cranium that gives them the edge on simpler sea animals, but Chris, my marine-biologist cousin, once told me a story about the lab's octopus clambering out of her tank, galloomphing across the tile floor, helping herself to the delicacies in the far tank, and then returning back to her own tank where she acted all casual the next morning. Unfortunately she'd left a incriminating, watery trail behind.
So this--our propsenity as humans to love smart creatures, and to love the creatures we nurse back to health--helps me understand how the director of Poulsbo's Marine Science Center could have fallen in love with Mr. Bob, an enormous red octopus with an alarming display of suckers on his legs. Mr. Bob joined the folks at the center, underweight and stressed, some months ago, but they faithfully fed him bits and pieces until he was a whopping 50 plus pounds. And then they let him go in the bay again. There's a photo in the news article of the director and a volunteer, brows knitted in concentration, lowering Mr. Bob in a big blue tub into the bay; one strawberry-colored tentacle hangs lazily over the side. But the photo that made me appreciate the news media again was on the front page of the article: the bearded director, clad in black wet suit, bobs on the water, holding a monster octopus' bright red head in his hands. He's kissing his friend goodbye, right on that bumpy, weird-eyed cranium.
That bizarre, touching image was enough to ignite my faith in the idiosyncratic goodness of humans again, and by the time we were picnicking in the park and a seal bobbed his slick head up to peer at us, miracles seemed like part of dailiness again. A silver fish that gives birth to live young; a love story between a bearded man and an octopus; a beautiful seal that swims up to picnickers and disappears again, as if the wonderful is just something that happens everyday.
Comments
Well worth the read, I think.
P.S. I am fascinated by the seal sighting! :O
Sincerely, your annoying older sister