Thunderheads

Frog eyes, they're watching you
seeing your every move

Hell has no fury like an architect scorn'd.

The rain never came, but the storm did. The thunderheads burst at the dinner table, late. It was over headless nails.

"Ils sont moches," stated my husband. They are ugly. It was exasperating. I was exasperated.

"On ne les voit même pas!" I shouted. I believe I said it tolerably civil like the first time. It was only the last ten or an hundred or so times that I lost all semblance of self-control. "On fait comme ça tout le temps! Tu les fonces dans la surface du bois, tu mets un tout petit bout de pâte à bois, et la peinture couvre tout! Même si tu laisses le bois clair, ça ne se voit pas!"

This was about when and how to attach the wood trim and who would win. Our marriage is about power and control at its dark heart. That's what you get when your husband is the eldest of a large pack of kids, and mother maintained control through absolute authority. You didn't pinch your brother and feed the peas to the dog? No matter, you're getting the rings on the backhand across the cheek to transmit on down the long table of siblings until it reaches the guilty party. The Sun King had nothing on her, and every woman becomes the "mother", a force to be subdued lest you lose your own. Forget that this time, you chose her. At least our marriage has another heart, struggling in that never-ending combat of good and evil, light and dark.

"J'aurais aimé que tu me laisses la décision de comment organiser le travail puisque c'est moi qui le fais."

"Pas si tu veux le faire n'importe comment. On met toujours le BA13 avant les boiseries. C'est les boiseries qui font la finition et passent par dessus. Si non, comment veux-tu passer le BA13 derrière?"

I knew he didn't really want to slide the sheetrock, otherwise called "Placo", short for "Placoplâtre", ou "BA13", behind the wood trim. He'd already told me how we didn't need to redo the old wood trim in the living room because it was perfectly fine to glue the Placo to the existing finished walls and leave the old trim, even where the new wall surface would stand out past the wood trim. I never forgave him for thinking that, and to be perfectly honest, it is at the heart of my anxiety and funk since we started the inside of the house: I know what is alright with him, and I know what is alright with me, and I know they are far, far apart.

It might have been salvageable last night had he stopped there, but no, he took it farther.

"Tu aurais pu me montrer les dessins pour que je voie comment c'est fait." I gasped. I had shown him the drawings. "Maintenant je sais pourquoi les ouvriers ont eu ras le bol." That did it. I lost it.

"Je te les ai montré, mais tu ne te souviens jamais de rien de ce que tu vois!"

Yes, I really did put the exclamation point in there when I said that, breaking all my rules concerning remaining calm to carry the point. Besides, there had already been all those other exclamation points since the beginning of the fight. "Tu dis que c'est beau, mais tu ne sais pas les lire pour voir comment cela doit être fait." I put my head back in my hands and pressed them to my scalp. The better to not throw my glass of wine across the table.

"Mais bien sur!" he returned the shot, "mais tu ne me montres pas où on va! Si c'est moi qui fais le travail, c'est moi qui décide comment on fait le travail!" So there!

No, it doesn't work that way. You see, there are ways to do things that we all learn and that we all learn to respect. We don't do whatever we can figure out on our own and call it good enough.
But, it didn't stop there, either.

"Tu es architecte --" he began, but I didn't let him add another word. I knew where that was going, tu as passé ton temps à faire des dessins de ce que tu voulais, mais tu ne savais rien faire toi-même.

I'd have forgiven him this raw assumption had I not told him a million times that I had spent the majority of my working years in the field because not only do architects in the States make pretty drawings of their reveries, they also oversee the execution of the work in the field, and I did an extra dose of that because I was perpetually assigned to fix the jobs that had gone wrong. My job was to satisfy the frustrated contractor and the nervous and angry client. Get it done, and get it done right. I also had the benefit of the best contractors, subs and woodworkers in all of Southwestern Connecticut for the highest-end work.

This I cannot forgive my husband for not allowing me.

I pressed my palms into the table and half stood, staring him in the eyes. I was in the zone out past rage. I was scarcely articulate. I sucked in air and struggled for enough calm to come close to syaing what I felt.

"Tu sais très bien que ce n'est pas le cas, et si tu ne le sais pas, c'est parce que tu n'écoutes pas ce que je te dis, tu ne le donnes aucune importance, et tu refuses d'accepter qu'oui, je sais faire, et quand les méthodes de travail et les matériaux changent, comme entre les States et ici, je me renseigne auprès des professionnels, et j'accepte leur savoir faire. Je ne fais pas n'importe quoi que me vient à l'esprit."

I also do not tell you how to do your job. I do not belittle the experience you have gained over the course of your professional life. I cannot take away the theater of your practice because it is outside the realm of the shared home. I cannot pretend I know how to do it because no one pretends there is DIY medicine, or at least not surgery. The Internet is full of DYI medicine, which is about as good as your average DIY home fixer-upper. There is no Home Depot or IKEA, stocked with everything you need to save the cost of visiting the doctor.

My profession isn't one. That's what this is about.

We have friends. Really. Can you believe it? Despite how we behave. He is an architect and she is not. They bought an apartment, a beautiful apartment in Paris, and they commenced to do work on it. As they described that work over dinner one evening, seated around their lovely dining table, the atmosphere thickened when they got to the storage system in clear wood he had designed and had custom built for a long, narrow space just beyond the wall of French doors that separate it from the living room. It took up the entire length of the rear wall, and it projected rather egoistically into the remaining space. The strip of room that remained appeared engulfed. She had a perfectly valid point. The cabinetry wasn't particularly suited to the circumstances, but he had carried the day, and she lives with it.

I understand that it doesn't always go well. I do. But, I show my husband the ideas I have. I do show him the drawings as they develop, and I hear him tell me and other people that it will be beautiful. I feel reassured. But, to make it really work, it absolutely has to be done properly. There is no negotiating on that.

And he has failed to understand what it meant to me to leave the practice of my profession and settle into the countryside, taking care of the raggedy family, the garden, the few things I could claim for myself without having to fight like a dog for a bone. To be credited with experience and knowledge for which I was actually once paid and for which I was even praised, for which we once won an award.

When I think of all the years of feeling like I knew nothing and had so much to learn, and the raw fear of having to pull it together or sink, it is the most painful to have that called into question by my husband. He has never seen my work. Never seen me at work. I have seen him at work. I know what he does, and I know what it is worth. My work was only a vague concept.

My home is not only our home, it is my opportunity to do something for us that others will see. To do it right so that it will show well and so that I can be proud is the least of what I ask. It is a way of reclaiming part of myself, of feeling competent and whole again. All I really ask is support for that, and we fight about back-nailing or headless nails and who gets to decide.

"C'est beaucoup mieux quand tu mets les boiseries avant et tu les fixes de derrière, et puis tu poses le Placo."

"Pourquoi si le tout petit trou est parfaitement invisible? Jamais je n'ai fais un projet -- jamais, et là on parle des projets qui vallaient dans les millions de dollars et furènt de la plus haute gamme -- l'où on posait les boiseries -- ce qui sont des finitions -- avant le Placo. Jamais. Même si'on laisse le bois clair, les clous de face font de tout petits trous qu'on ne voit pas de tout, mais nous allons peindre le bois!" And on and on.

Why did I have to fight something so basic as putting up the sheetrock before the window trim?

Why?

But the best thing about having done the summer room? I have a choice of where I wish to sleep when I quit the marital bed.

He brought me coffee, dates and dried apricots this morning.

"Je voudrais ton avis," he said when I had come back into the house, carrying my tray. I'd like your opinion.

"Es-tu sûr? Je suis très bien là," I said.

"Je sais," he said, "mais je ne suis pas bien là," he glanced up towards the ceiling, "seul."

We're back at work. For now. Or he is. I have to get back to the drawings so he can see exactly how it is done and organize his work.


....

Fish fry Fryday!

My beautiful baby ghost

I knew there had to be hatchlings -- "fry" in English, or "alevins" in French -- in there, since I have seen the females swollen with eggs and the males chasing them around, nudging their sides to get them to release those riches in future spawn, and I just saw the first set of eyeballs on an eyelash (I didn't make that up myself) darting from the algae at the edge of the basin toward the middle.



Which deepens my suspicion of what the fish have really been doing these last few days: gathering around the groups of fertilized eggs, eating the fry as they emerge.

The Annual Homeowners' Association Fish Fry!

Now I know how I am going to spend way too much of my time today, wearing my Indiana Jones red gardening hat against the sun: watching my fish-pond-in-a-fountain's answer to Survivor. It's a Darwinian life.


....

Fish overboard!

Frog eyes

It was terrifying. Positively terrifying to think of the tiniest baby fish getting to close to the edge of the basin and finding themselves washed onto the brick ledge, only to be left there as the waters of the storm receded, struggling in vain to get back into the safety of the deeper waters. I struggled in vain against going out into "the weather" to see if any required saving.

I grabbed a rain jacket and ran out into the driving rain. The plastic basins and trash cans we have placed under the disconnected downspout to catch the water tumbling off the roofs had long since seen their capacity to contain the water that could fall from the roofs exceeded. They sat in several inches of water at the edge of the slab on which the house rests. I hardly noticed the sound of the water crashing onto their overflowing surface; it has become a background noise in the last days, like the tumult of the turtle doves in the trees overhead. Something like C-5's in love. We have all grown used to their thrashing about in the limbs, wings beating like elephants' ears swatting flies in the breeze. I crouched down to examine the sheet of water on the bricks that make the sloped border.

This, it has not failed to escape me in moments like this, when the basin is overflowing, was one of the very few smart things our predecessors here did. Sloping the bricks that make the ledge down into the basin, very slightly, causes the water that accumulates on them, and everything it contains, tend to flow back into the basin when the deluge is over. Not that no one is lost overboard.

I found a single, tiny fish, twitching about in the shallows on the brick. Very gently, with the tip of my finger, I pushed the water alongside him back into the high seas. He blinked and looked around in the middle of the swells between rain drops. I lost sight of him. There weren't any others, but my rain jacket was already soaked through to my sweater. Whoever else would be so unfortunate as to get to close to the edge would likely perish. There's nothing to be done for it, when the rain falls like it did yesterday and in the days previous.

Only a couple hours before, I had gone to Truffaut to pick something up that had been on order. I went to see the shubunkins and the carp koi. I knew I was going to take more home. Not like I needed more fish, with all the babies, any more than I needed another hole in my head.

I think I have a fish problem.

The thing is that they all come over to the side of the tank to look at you when you approach. They want to come home with you, and when you have such a wonderful fish-pond-in-a-fountain to offer them, how can you resist?

Besides, the two little carp koi seem lonely. They are often in their own corners; the comets and the shubunkins, closely related, are having a perpetual party, to which the little koi seem reluctant to accept the invitation. I needed more carp koi, and a couple more shubunkins wouldn't be a bad thing, either. The babies are some mix of shubunkin and comet, mostly grey, some orange, others clearly calico and spotted, perhaps some mostly blue, like the two larger ones I bought at Florosny, just before they stopped selling their fish, for "sanitary reasons", meaning that the fish were catching a flesh-eating disease from a source of infection: one of the larger carp koi, who was missing large chunks of his own flesh along the dorsal area.

"Ca ne lui fait pas mal?" I'd asked Cyril.

"Non."

"Et les autres, ils ne vont pas l'attraper de lui?"

"Non," he shook his head, looking at the fish swimming around the leper with me. I didn't believe him. He was spinning to control damage. I understood. "Je vais chercher le traitement ce week-end." He explained that he had learned at a seminar on aquarium fish he had attended with his parents that the way to treat this disease is to dunk the poor fish in water and rock salt.

"Ca ne leur fait pas mal non plus?"

"Ils ne l'apprécient pas, mais --"

"Il faut le faire."

"Il faut le faire," he nodded again. Poor fish!

Ours appear to have escaped the terrible microbe. When I went to Florosny the day before yesterday, I checked to see if the fish were available for purchase. Their shubunkin are more exceptional. There was no sign, but there was one fish dining on a large, dead carp koi at the bottom of the tank. I know this is normal, but.

But.



I am hopelessly in love with the life in the basin, and most of all, perhaps, with the frogs.

Sam came out last evening and stood on the other side of the basin from where I was observing the fry during a momentary lull in the downpour.

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "I thought it was a fish, but it was a frog! It swam from here across the basin." I followed where his finger pointed. "They're fast," he added, after a pause, with unconcealed admiration. I know what he means.

They stretch out their bodies, from head to the point of their hind-end, and then they draw up their long, powerful legs and push them to their furthest reach, again and again, propelling themselves through the water in a sort of perfection of body and movement. If we say Michael Phelps is a fish, I say he is a frog.

This was the Sam who I asked the other day what he thought of the baby fish.

"I don't watch the fish," he said, imperial, with the greatest possible expression of lack of interest in such things as fish, anywhere.

But the cuecueya, that's a whole other something. That they agree, even chose, to live in our basin is a wonderful thing. I would like to swim like a cuiatl, although I am not sure that I wish to become one. I might appreciate them less by being one of them.

Meanwhile, get this guy a cocktail. I climbed out the kitchen window to get this picture so as to least disturb him and miss it.
....

Ethnographic allegory

Jour 2 après la découverte de nos alevins hier. Pour mieux voir les petits alevins dans les photos, double-cliquer sur l'une des photos et puis dans Picasa Web Album, choisir "full screen" pour le diaporama assez grand pour les distinguer.



Je pourrais les regarder toute la journée. Ca nuit fortement à mes autres projets.


There are certainly many more than I can count, many more than I think. Some have likely been eaten already by their parents and the other fish, and some will possibly be eaten yet, although I think they stand a good chance of surviving because there are lots of places for them to hide -- in the plants, the rocks, and the roots of the Common (or Lesser) Duckweed, Lemna minor (fr. Lentilles d'eau).

I have also been feeding the fish a little more in the hopes of making the offspring look less appetizing.

There are things I could do to protect them, actually, like remove them and place them in a carefully prepared aquarium, but I think that is unnecessary. Audouin began this experiment about 10 years ago with 2 goldfish the children were keeping in a fish bowl, which he found too sad to tolerate, and tossed them into the fountain, with which he didn't know what, really, to do yet. The act of tossing them into the fountain turned it into "le basin", or the fish-pond-in-a-fountain. There, they reproduced very successfully with very little (voir aucune) attention from my husband, who really can't be bothered with much in the way of maintenance, and he does enough in vitro at Poissy to make any more here feel like recreation. I could see fry every year, until the roots of the reeds became too dense, and the population had to come from the first two, since he introduced no others until this year.

Lesson to be drawn: they don't really need much help if the conditions are right, and we've apparently got that nailed.

My purchase of 6 more Sunday day feels a little silly now, but I defend it (pas que j'en ai besoin) by the necessity of some really vermilion goldfish, preferably with long tails. And the Koi carp were just too beautiful, all shimmery in gold and silver, not to have them, too.

I sit there, at the edge of the basin, and watch the fish swim. It's incredibly beautiful in the brilliant sunshine. Everything is so clear under the water, and the fish glide, dart, and chase each other. I don't like to swim. I don't much like going in the water, but watching them, I think of the Axolotl.

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the michin. I went to see them in their fish-pond-in-a-fountain outside the living room door and stayed for hours and hours, even when my coffee and oatmeal were done, observing their activity, their gliding and playful darting about. My michin are happy. Now I am a happy michin.

Which is rather happier entirely than my friend Cortazar becoming an axolotl.

See? Audouin is right; Moosesucks is better than Paris, and who needs Le Jardin des Plantes, anyway, when you can have your own garden of plants and pond-in-a-fountain in which to observe other species? Everyone without imagination thinks to go to Paris, when there are so many other places, not so far away, where wonderful things happen -- especially for the extra fertile soil of the expat mind -- to stimulate the senses, and thought. Just think what Cortazar could have done in Moosesucks.

On second thought, never mind.
....

Axolotl
By Julio Cortazar

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down the boulevard PortRoyal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L'Hopital and saw green among all that gray and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against the gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.

In the library at Sainte-Genevieve, I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma. That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank. I read that specimens of them had been found in Africa capable of living on dry land during the periods of drought, and continuing their life under water when the rainy season came. I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that their oil was used (no longer used, it said ) like codliver oil.

I didn't care to look up any of the specialized works, but the next day I went back to the Jardin des Plantes. I began to go every morning, morning and afternoon some days. The aquarium guard smiled perplexedly taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks and set to watching them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together. It had been enough to detain me that first morning in front of the sheet of glass where some bubbles rose through the water. The axolotls huddled on the wretched narrow (only I can know how narrow and wretched) floor of moss and stone in the tank. There were nine specimens, and the majority pressed their heads against the glass, looking with their eyes of gold at whoever came near them. Disconcerted, almost ashamed, I felt it a lewdness to be peering at these silent and immobile figures heaped at the bottom of the tank. Mentally I isolated one, situated on the right and somewhat apart from the others, to study it better. I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin which joined with the tail, but what obsessed me was the feet, of the slenderest nicety, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human nails. And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery. A very slender black halo ringed the eye and etched it onto the pink flesh, onto the rose stone of the head, vaguely triangular, but with curved and triangular sides which gave it a total likeness to a statuette corroded by time. The mouth was masked by the triangular plane of the face, its considerable size would be guessed only in profile; in front a delicate crevice barely slit the lifeless stone. On both sides of the head where the ears should have been, there grew three tiny sprigs, red as coral, a vegetal outgrowth, the gills, I suppose. And they were the only thing quick about it; every ten or fifteen seconds the sprigs pricked up stiffly and again subsided. Once in a while a foot would barely move, I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head --difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it's less if we stay quietly.

It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping that mineral lethargy in which they spent whole hours. Above all else, their eyes obsessed me. In the standing tanks on either side of them, different fishes showed me the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own. The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. Gluing my face to the glass (the guard would cough fussily once in a while), I tried to see better those diminutive golden points, that entrance to the infinitely slow and remote world of these rosy creatures. It was useless to tap with one finger on the glass directly in front of their faces; they never gave the least reaction. The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy.

And nevertheless they were close. I knew it before this, before being an axolotl. I learned it the day I came near them for the first time. The anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the reverse of what most people believe, the distance that is traveled from them to us. The absolute lack of similarity between axolotls and human beings proved to me that my recognition was valid, that I was not propping myself up with easy analogies. Only the little hands . . . But an eft, the common newt, has such hands also, and we are not at all alike. I think it was the axolotls' heads, that triangular pink shape with the tiny eyes of gold. That looked and knew. That laid the claim. They were not animals.

It would seem easy, almost obvious, to fall into mythology. I began seeing in the axolotls a metamorphosis which did not succeed in revoking a mysterious humanity. I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation. Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression and nonetheless terribly shining, went through me like a message: "Save us, save us." I caught myself mumbling words of advice, conveying childish hopes.They continued to look at me, immobile; from time to time the rosy branches of the gills stiffened. In that instant I felt a muted pain; perhaps they were seeing me, attracting my strength to penetrate into the impenetrable thing of their lives. They were not human beings, but I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself. The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom. Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty, what semblance was awaiting its hour?

I was afraid of them. I think that had it not been for feeling the proximity of other visitors and the guard, I would not have been bold enough to remain alone with them. "You eat them alive with your eyes, hey," the guard said, laughing; he likely thought I was a little cracked. What he didn't notice was that it was they devouring me slowly with their eyes, in a cannibalism of gold. At any distance from the aquarium, I had only to think of them, it was as though I were being affected from a distance. It got to the point that I was going every day, and at night I thought of them immobile in the darkness, slowly putting a hand out which immediately encountered another. Perhaps their eyes could see in the dead of night, and for them the day continued indefinitely. The eyes of axolotls have no lids. I know now that there was nothing strange, that that had to occur. Leaning over in front of the tank each morning, the recognition was greater. They were suffering, every fiber of my body reached toward that stifled pain, that stiff torment at the bottom of the tank. They were lying in wait for something, a remote dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of the axolotls. Not possible that such a terrible expression which was attaining the overthrow of that forced blankness on their stone faces should carry any message other than one of pain, proof of that eternal sentence, of that liquid hell they were undergoing. Hopelessly, I wanted to prove to myself that my own sensibility was projecting a nonexistent consciousness upon the axolotl. They and I knew. So there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.

Only one thing was strange: to go on thinking as usual, to know. To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the glass again, I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium, his thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizing him, being him himself, I was an axolotl and in my world. The horror began -- I learned in the same moment -- of believing myself prisoner in the body of an axolotl, metamorphosed into him with my human mind intact, buried alive in an axolotl, condemned to move lucidly among unconscious creatures. But that stopped when a foot just grazed my face, when I moved just a little to one side and saw an axolotl next to me who was looking at me, and understood that he knew also, no communication possible, but very clearly. Or I was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.

He returned many times, but he comes less often now. Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday, he looked at me for a long time and left briskly. It seemed to me that he was not so much interested in us any more, that he was coming out of habit. Since the only thing I do is think, I could think about him a lot. It occurs to me that at the beginning we continued to communicate, that he felt more than ever one with the mystery which was claiming him. But the bridges were broken between him and me, because what was his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to his human life. I think that at the beginning I was capable of returning to him in a certain way -- ah, only in a certain way-- and of keeping awake his desire to know us better. I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance. I believe that all this succeeded in communicating something to him in those first days, when I was still he. And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls.

....

I read, once, when I read this in Spanish in college, that axolotls distinguish themselves in nature, from a human point of view, in having a heart very close to the human heart in anatomy and development.

I cannot find any substantiation for this, except that they have a heart defect that is highly observable in embryonic form, which is helpful in human heart research.
....

Fry!

I've been dying to be able to say that.

Can you see it?

There, at the edge of the shadow of the rock, at seven o'clock from the white speck. Double-click to enlarge the photo, then hit your back arrow to return.

Did you see it?

They have only just hatched. One is larger. Several days old. I had been waiting since we emptied the fish-pond-in-a-fountain to repair the leak that caused the death of nearly all of our 50 goldfish during a terrible freeze, worried to death (me) that the surviving fish and the frogs would not find it to their liking, first being forcibly removed, then being reinserted into their old environment, to see if everyone would settle in and make babies again. I wasn't expecting to see the fry, even if I had been looking for them, and hoping.

It was a moment of pure joy, until I went to the computer to download my pictures of the babies and saw the New York Times News Alert: Air France Flight From Brazil to Paris Is Missing With 228 on Board, Air France Said.

The moment was gone.

I walked back to Audouin, home on this holiday -- lundi Pentecote, a day off, just like the Monday following Easter; old Catholic habits die hard in an old Catholic country turned secular --, at the fish basin with no joy, just the skin on my face tight and cold. A flight with 228 people on board, Rio to Paris. It could be any flight with anyone's family members on board, any day. Since 8 am, they have been collecting those arriving to greet their friends and family, and taking them to a special room, with psychologists and doctors to help them cope, to wait news of the flight, lost over the Atlantic. We slept; we lay and watched the morning sunshine in the tree out the window; we found the fry in the fish basin and rejoiced, as they learned they had no reason now to do the same.

I could hear the neighbor's rotating sander, out doing something with the Jeep. If he was there, he 4 year old son was nearby. I grabbed my cup of coffee and hurried out the gate, as though the fry were going to disappear in the next 5 minutes if I took my time. His wife came, too, the baby in her arms, protesting that she was still in her pyjamas.

"Ca va comme ça," said her husband before I got a chance to say it. It's a tiny village. As long as you're covered, it's all good.

"Il y a des grenouilles, aussi?" asked the little one.

"Oui, il y a des grenouilles. Tu veux les voir?" He nodded. He wanted to see the frogs. They are only slightly more interesting than the newly hatched fry, resting on the clumps of reed roots in the shallow water under the sun. The larger frogs wait until we have cleared the area before they take their chances and come out to sun bathe.

In our world, there is new fish life and irises opening in the brilliant light.

In another, only a short distance away, others prepare themselves for the news that is inevitable now that the plane never did arrive, the radar never did find it.

Only yesterday I talked with my step-daughter about death. She is afraid of it, like I am. "Every day,"I said, out in the parking lot before we went in to pick out more goldfish and Shunbunkin (they didn't have any small ones, we got 4 Comets and 2 Karp Koi), "people are joyful because a baby is born, and every day others are sad because a loved one dies. Both," I said, fully aware of the incredible banality of what I was pronouncing, "are part of life. We have to accept the one like we look forward to the other, but live for the joy of the moment, without fear."

She doesn't know yet that 228 people have died on an Airbus 330 over the Atlantic. I prefer not to be the one to tell her.
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