Evening. Ennui.

Night falls early

L'ennui. Ou la fatigue. Ou la déprime. De l'amour. Ou saisonnière. Ou la grippe tout court.

Who knows.

I must report on Eugénie G. Toad. Eugénie is not in her toad house. She has not been seen since the first day, when she settled into a burrow and began to tunnel. I thought the hole meant she was there, but, being unable to refrain from being certain, I removed the dry linden leaves, reached in and felt the inside of the tunnel with my fingers. I was rather afraid to stick Eugénie in the eye, since they dig backwards, pushing the dirt up and out, but I felt nothing but the end of the tunnel, somewhat abruptly. Eugénie had gone.

Was ittoo hard to tunnel in that location, beneath the yew? Was it not to her liking? Whatever the reason, she is wherever she is, I'm unreasonably sad about it, and the several toadlets I removed from the skimmers and the pool, preparing to close it for the winter, didn't stay long in the toad house either. I added, by the way, another one. Both are vacant. They don't even seem very interested in the shallow pool I made for them to sit in.

In the days that I waited and hoped to see Eugénie again, witnessing the massacre of the toads trying to cross the road that cuts across the forest at the center of the boucle de la Seine, I joined Froglife, and I wrote to ask them who might be organizing here in France to do something with amphibians other than eat them.

For the record, we do not eat toads.

Also for the record, I do not eat frogs.

I received a reply from Lucy in the UK (I love that name), who offered to put me in touch with Ninon, near Rambouillet. Lucy told me that they use a system of fences along the road side and pitfall traps to collect the toads, adding that "this system is very popular in Europe but for some reason is not widely used here." This year, according to Lucy, the group in Rambouillet "helped 4,000 toads across the road!"

I love the exclamation point. I love the enthusiasm for the toad lives saved for another season, or at least until they migrate again.

Now, to contact Ninon and see who they are, what they are doing, and how I can set up a similar "toads on roads" effort here in the boucle. One reason they don't use the fencing might be the expense in setting it up and maintaining it. I read about that.

As long as Eugénie is safe out there. That's all that matters.

Peut-être je la reverrai au printemps. Peut-être.

Maybe I will carve my pumpkins tomorrow, even though Sam -- 18 now -- is in Amsterdam, and definitely not trick-or-treating (which they now do here in France, too). I still believe in Halloween, even if most of the candy of this season has been "dedicated and prayed over by witches".

Sounds good to this croan.

Just kidding you. Bwa-cacklecacklecacklecakle!!!! Funny, though, that the original blog post, The Danger of Celebrating Halloween: Spiritual Life in God, by guest writer Kimberly Daniels on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network, has been taken down from their site.

Does this mean someone over there at CBN still believes in America as we know it and has a little sense in their head? Evil children, trick-or-treating in America's exurbs with the full approval and participation of their parents. Good God. What is America coming to when parents encourage their children to participate in the work of Satan and to consume the sweets that will lead them to His ways?

I mean think about it. All the shelves in school and public libraries we would have to empty of picture books with reference to this Satanic American holiday! And -- save us! -- "The Peanuts" It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! All the DVDs and VHS tapes that would have to be confiscated, reburned and taped over with Pat Robertson's choice of the best fundamentalist American Christian sermons of all time! And, once, invited by a family with whom my young son and I were acquainted, I attended a Halloween party for families at The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints in Greenwich, CT with quarterback Steve Young's parents present, actually condoning this holiday. Think of it, Steve Young and his wife later defied the Mormon church, actively opposing California's Prop 8 on October 31, 2008!

See? It's Halloween at fault. Now, that is ghoulish. What were the Mormons thinking?

Croak.
....

Charming désespoir

Carelessness, without care

empty packs of Marlboros
floating in the can
collecting rainwater
under the roof gutter

Walking to the garage in the half-frozen rain falling rather despondently from the gray sky onto the soaked brown landscape of our garden and what lies beyond it, a sorry view today, to get a roll of paper towel to clean up the drippings of the garbage bag that only I can see when I take a dust thing of dog hair and sand, the mountainous recolte of my administrations with the broom -- as every time, more than once a day --, to the garbage, my eye spies again the empty packs of Marlboro cigarettes, discarded and trampled into what was a lawn, bare now, again, of grass and sporting clumps of moss, both growing there and fallen from the roof of the petit maison.

Entering the house, I see the guts of a mouse, all that's left of a new kill by one of the cats, between the doormat and the door.

I am utterly deflated. I can go to Paris and chat with my friends over a bowl of potage and an entrecôte, saignant, a glass of wine in a bistro where even the house wine in a pichet is good, but even with these friends I met through our mutual enthusiastic support of Barack Obama and the Change to come, there is more of the bitterness of which we are not supposed to allow ourselves the taste, chastised for losing site of the Great forest for the trees. But, I am seated across the bistro table from one such tree, and he asks, with a sense of having been deceived or betrayed, "What happened to the Separation of church and state? Would Lyndon Johnson have asked a segregationist to say the benediction? He casts us onto the heap."

What are we supposed to say to console what can't and shouldn't be consoled? There now, hush, one liberation, one vindication at a time, my friend, one redemption for themselves at a time, because that is all the American people, any People can support. Yours will come.

Why wonder that France is his chosen home when their next president could be Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor of this city, himself a publicly gay man and and free to enjoy full privileges in his society, with the exception of marriage in this historically Catholic country, not quite ready to let the last remnant of a faith they have otherwise largely, although not wholly, not all of them, for there remain a number who practice with as great a faith as always, discarded. If he cannot marry, he can become a legal partner, declared in his own mairie, and receive all the same benefits of a legally married couple.


"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Invalidate Prop 8

sign the petition before February 14, Valentine's Day

I have, as anyone who has read this journal since its inception, or knew me before, knows, worked so hard on that lawn, trying to make grass not only sprout and grow, but thrive. I have worked hours that can't be counted without admitting to a reasonable plea of unreasonableness excused only by insanity, or deliberately unacknowledged desperation. Then, the workers come, smoke their cigarettes and leave their empty packages behind, along with their unstowed and unprotected tools and dribbled sand, bits of masonry and chaux, scattered everywhere, what's left of the grass and weeds, smashed flat under their -- and our -- feet into the ground that can't now possibly give life to yet another lawn this spring, and I wonder who enjoys control over what?

Careless. Without care.

Mary asked, forwarding the Paul Krugman OpEd of yesterday's post, "Who is in charge in DC?" There was so much anger and accusation in those six words, "Recall or fire them all," "repugs and media are trying to stir controversy on the hill... as though the economy alone isn't enough... why is this not being taken seriously? My god, this is our economic future, jobs retirements, everything..." The sentence leaving you to call the everything to mind for yourself. Your everything.

And why aren't they taking this seriously?

I do not even need to struggle to find the words, since I just found them this morning and marked them in my book with an unopened envelope containing a recent statement of my investment accounts, worth something as a marker of the True sentiments that mark their cause, the author of which is Octavian Nothing, soldier in Lord Dunmore's Royal Ethiopian Regiment, "Liberty to Slaves" embroidered onto the shirt of his Loyalist uniform:

"It is in fact easily discernible that governments are instituted to commit the crimes that their citizens require for gain, but cannot countenance committing privately."

I intervened in this piece of charming youthful désespoir, countering that some philosophers say governments were instituted to protect the natural rights of the citizen; to which Octavian said that nature recognizes no rights. "Our rights are unnatural, or we should need no government to defend them." I protested; he insisted. "Look abroad in the fields," he said. "What may kill, kills, what may eat, eats. All things are born unequal, and there is no law but that inequality."

I did not disagree, but I was uneasy at the savagery in his address. "You would say yourself," I reminded him, "'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.'"

"And you would say yourself," he replied, "'The world is the house of the strong.'" Thus ended our protreptic discourse.

-- The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, Volume II, The Kingdom on the Waves, M.T. Anderson

Who are the strong, upon what do they depend, and what does it take to make them recognize Justice? They will only change place with others, once brought low. And we will continue to fight amongst ourselves, making some True friends, brothers and sisters along the way.
....