The Ingenious Mr. Fairchild

Osteospermum, or Cape Daisies

I needed a hose connector for the hose that cracked in half during the Great January Freeze of 2009, but the store was empty, and I wandered. It's a sort of luxury to be alone with the plants, to stroll among them, read their name tags, lean in to see if they smell. I didn't mean to buy any. A hose connector, insecticide for the grubs (which they haven't had for several trips now), planting soil, and perhaps some Cranesbill geraniums (if they had them... they did not). I arrived at the roses.

For several seasons, I have been wanting to plant rambling roses along the concrete rails of the top terrace to let them cover it and spill down over the low wall and the plants below. It's been a project for when I get to it, but the buy 2, get 1 free rose sale got me first. There were David Austin English roses. I have never seen them at Florosny before, but Victor is gone, and Victor bought the roses in years past.

Victor being gone is not a good thing. Neither is Thierry being gone, along with nearly everyone else, and over half the usual stock. The store is sad. The choices are vastly reduced. If Victor hadn't told me just before Christmas, the last time I saw him there, when Audouin and I bought our Christmas tree, that they had been losing money every year for quite awhile, I would have figured it out this season. They are saving money, and I don't know if they won't do themselves in with what is left for sale. Slim pickings. I confess that I have been going to Truffaut and wandering through their offerings.

There were Katherine Morleys and cottage roses (I wanted some), and the Pegasus, William Morris and The Ingenious Mr. Fairchild I eventually bought, after looking everything over, and deciding that these are rose varieties I wanted anyway. They are not ramblers, but they offer the benefit of full foliage and arching branches, which enable them to fill in as medium bushes and be trained as small climgers. They are also very good repeat bloomers, heavily scented of tea rose. The The Igenious Mr. Fairchild is a peony-like rose. Exquisite. When the peonies have passed, the The Ingenious Mr. Fairchild will fill in to remind us of their beauty.

So, when you buy roses, clematis are required. I should have bought more, but I did buy one -- a "Princess Diana" that scrambles along fences and through climbing roses, summer blooming right along with them. It's deep magenta makes a playmate for the burnt orange of the hemerocallis. I think I will go back for a Jackmanii tomorrow to train along behind the yellow choreopsis, in full bloom now.



The hose connector was for the project of the day: cleaning the pool. They didn't have one I needed in the right size, but they had tons in the wrong size. I asked at the register why there would not be a single one in the smaller size, while there were racks of the larger size.

"Un cambriolage?" she proposed. A burglary? Was she joking?

"Vous plaisantez?" I checked. She nodded no, and smiled understandingly, as though the theft had occured in my garage.

"Mais, ils ont cambriolé le magasin pour prendre des réparateurs de tuyaux? Ils ont pris autre chose?"

"Oui, des tondeuses." Lawnmowers. Lawnmowers and hose connectors for 13 to 15 mm diameter hoses. I get the lawnmowers.

"Ce fut quand?"

"Dans la nuit de samedi à dimanche."

"Ce week-end qui vient de passer?" I asked, surprised. Not that it mattered which Saturday night. She nodded, and smiled again, as though to offer me condolences for the burglary of my favorite garden center. The manager arrived with the register key to do my refund. I had bought a hose connector on Sunday. The only size that remained. Too big. "Ils sont rentrés comment? -- oh! Mais peut-être vous préférez ne rien dire, pas que je vais cambrioler mon magasin préféré, ou n'importe quel magasin ceci dit."

"Il suffit," said the manager, in her whispery voice, "de couper le grillage, casser des vitres... comme dans tous les cambriolages." I felt like I was in a library. Of rare books.

"Ils ont cassé des vitres?" She nodded. "Ben. C'est dégoûtant." It is disgusting. I was sorry. I had to go to Truffaut, and I found what I needed, but the hose thingie still leaks a bit. At least I was able to fill the pool enough to be able to put the chlorine shock tablets in the skimmers and turn them on. It's a lighter shade of toxic green now.

I found the last frog doing laps along the edge of the pool. It's quite a beautiful stroke, actually. The power of those long rear legs and feet.

He usually hides from me, but this time he appeared to wish to get my attention. He came right up to where I was scrubbing below the crumbling crown and didn't dive to the bottom when I spoke to him. I scrubbed a little harder. He didn't move, but a drop of rain fell on me. By the time I had made it halfway around the pool to get the net, it was pouring, and he was back to doing laps. I found shelter under the think needles of a droopy sort of pine, and waited. It was a deluge. The thunder began to crack somewhere over the ridge up behind the house, and the frog swam up and down the pool, the surface of which looked like the stiff peaks of beaten egg whites under the pummeling rain. It slowed a little.

I ventured out with my blue child's net, bought for exactly this purpose in the harbor of Portsall in Brittany back in April. I approached. He watched me. He swam over a little closer. I looked at him. We looked at one another. I lifted the net. He didn't budge. It's usually enough to make him dive to the farthest depths. I moved a little closer. He waited. I moved the net again. He continued to watch me. I was sure he was thinking Hurry, will you? The chlorine is really starting to sting my eyes. I lowered my net, and he practically stepped in.

Until, that is, I started to lift it out of the water. That was enough for him! Out was what he wanted. A trip to the fish-pond-in-a-fountain was not on his program.

He lept. I grabbed. He lept again. I lunged. I tried to close the net around him. He lept again. I lunged, placing my hand over him. He bleated.

(Serious. He sounded just like a very tiny lamb being stabbed with a pointy knife. Or something.)

I closed the net around him and told him to be patient. He'd like where he was going. Really. Serious. I hurried up the 28 steps of the main stair, two strides across the second terrace and up the remaining 5 steps. I let the net into the water. He looked at me.

"What? It's a little cold? Sorry." He hesitated again. "C'mon. You're free. This is it. You'll like it. The others are all here already." I gave the net a little shake, and he pushed off, and directly under the mud.

I hope the others will make him feel welcome.

Or her.
....

Speaking of he's gone

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Dick (Uncut)
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Economic Crisis

Why isn't he gone?

Oh, and I did the research out for the kids out there:

In 2006, Taylor returned to the nation's capital as the grand marshal of Washington D.C.'s Capital Pride.

Now you get it.
....

There's no sunshine when he's gone

June rain falls again

It's Monday morning and the sun didn't come back out, and it's only to work to which he's gone.

We start to get very worried every day there is no sunshine; not that rain isn't necessary, it's just that for the last few years, when the sun goes away, it tends to stay away, for whole weeks at a time during the summer.

Nothing is as beautiful without sunshine. There is no magical, delightful, intoxicating (it is) play of light in the leaves and the petals of the flowers to make the colors vibrant. They are just green and purple. Or green and orange. Colors waiting for life. Whole flowers bloom and die without ever being beautiful. Whole seasons of flowers bloom and fade away without even being seen from behind the walls and the closed windows. The birds don't sing. So, on a day like today, when the sun is gradually covered by uniformly ash-gray clouds, like an old camp fire exhausted, we begin to worry that this is the day that the gray, cold and wet summer begins again.

And my "to do" list is long and discouraging.

There is the pool, which needs more vacuuming and chemicals, now that the electricity is restored to the pump. It also means that we are about to be solicited, heavily. Watching the sheets of algae disappear into the vacuum yesterday, my husband glanced over to the neighbor's lower garden, just behind the wall along our hydrangea bed behind the diving board.

"Ca ne va pas passer inaperçu très longtemps. Je pense parfois qu'il serait bien d'installer un film vert." He sighed. It took me a second to get it. A green film we can pull over the surface of the pool to make it look like we just never have been able to get the pump going to keep the neighbors at bay. I laughed.

"Elles montent sur le toit de leur cabane afin de mieux guetter la piscine. J'ai même trouvé des bouts de bois tombés dans les hydrangeas. Ca ne me surprendrait pas d'apprendre qu'elles s'en servent du pont pour rentrer du toit dans notre jardin, et qu'elles viennent dans la piscine quand nous ne sommes pas là." It has been disturbing to find lengths of wood, supported on the one end by their cabin's roof, and on the other by the top of our garden wall, looking every bit the bridge to our pool.

It starts about now, the gate bell sounding every sunny day around 5:25 pm. Sounding until I answer, even if it is an inconvenience, regardless of what I am doing -- which can't be called work (it seems) unless I am actually paid for it -- and as difficult as it is to say to an 8-year-old that no, it is not possible to come and play in the pool this afternoon, I am forced to do it, over and over again because the message "wait for an invitation" doesn't penetrate. Hope dies hard in the breast of school-aged children. They have even showed up at the gate in their bathing suits, towels in hand, all ready.

"Bonjour!" they say to me, "Est-ce qu'on peut venir dans la piscine?"

I raise my eyes to the windows of the house across the street and wonder if their mother knows they have arrived, all ready to go in the pool. I think she does. I have hinted, and she merely smiles. I think of our neighbor across the street and up the hill a long time ago when we were growing up, our babysitter's mother. We knew that their pool was strictly invitation only, and that the invitations, no matter how hot and muggy it got in the Syracuse summer, would not come. Under no circumstances did you ask. You did not even talk about the pool, in which their mother, our high school gym teacher and coach, did her laps. Two miles a day. We had been invited once, years before, when we were very young. Perhaps our reluctance to indicate any interest in the pool, out of a sense of propriety, enforced by our mother, canceled the hope of an invitation by showing us to be uninterested. Better that than risk forcing an invitation, we consoled ourselves, or soliciting pity.

Besides, I wore my jeans on the hottest and closest of days, sure that my body was far better off covered than exposed in a bathing suit. I nearly passed out on those days, working as a camp counselor for Parks and Rec, on the long walk to and from my old elementary school and the afternoons spent on the playing fields and the tar of the old tennis court the school hosed down to turn into a skating rink in the equally extreme winters, when the expression of humidity turned from mugginess and thunderstorms to freeze and blizzards from Canada, across the great weather amplifiers known as the Great Lakes.

The bell rang the other day. It rang and rang. I heard the gate open -- they don't always wait for a response -- and dashed into the house. I think I was seen. I saw a movement of white by the ragged corner tree, and I felt like a fugitive in my own home and garden. I felt, in short, like a coward and a fool (not the worst I have felt these past couple weeks). I returned to face my fate, grabbing my camera on the way back outside to take more pictures of the magnificently large green-headed frog, who had just turned his back to the afternoon sun where it sat on the mound of moss I saved from the old basin. I nearly offered him (or her) some sunblock. I squatted as close as the edge of the fish-pond-in-a-fountain would let me get to it, facing the gate, and the bell rung again.

I raised my head and a finger, placing it before my lips to indicate silence and then wagging it in the air before me, the silent "No, not now." I pointed to the frog she could not see on the mound of moss hidden from her view. She did not leave. I continued to try to get a picture of the frog's smile, straight across its wide, white throat, beating in time to its heart. Sam came down to head to Thai boxing, and went out through the gate. Later, when he came home, he said, "You know, Mom, she was still there, sitting by the gate when I left."

There is a deep and abiding interest in our pool. No wait is too long if there is hope yet of a desire satisfied.

"Oui, mais elle t'apprécie vraiment bien aussi," his stepfather -- my husband -- chimed in helpfully. And the fact that she does like me makes it even that much worse, because I like her, too. I just can't be the parks and recreation counselor for the village.

"Je sais, mais je ne peux pas les avoir tout le temps dans la piscine. Je ne suis pas le maître nageur du village, tu sais," I whined, sighing.

"Je sais."

Resist and feel badly. Give in with good grace and feel almost as badly for not being able to make the rules and get everyone to live by them. There's no point; they won't, and it's June, and I will hear Je m'ennuie every day when the bus rolls up to the house and lets the kids off. A green film sounds pretty good.

"Et oui. La pompe ne marche pas. On ne comprend rien! Chaque année c'est une chose ou une autre, et la piscine ne marche jamais," I said, laughing, imagining us swimming silently in the clear water after dark, making everyone believe that the pump just never did start working properly, leaving the water too green and murky to go in.

Then, there are the additional plants I bought for the containers, being watered by the falling rain.

The details I need to draw for the new entry to the kitchen -- the workers are supposed to be back in 2 or 3 weeks --, the details for a toit végétal for the petite maison, and a garage sort of thing that can pass the mairie's review for a structure for which they can close their eyes and give us the go-ahead on land that is considered a flood zone and on which no structures can be constructed.

There is the other guest room, the one I will paint green.

The sea grass floor-covering for the two rooms, about which I need to make a final decision. Do it or not? The installer called, certainly wondering what happened to our rush job for my half-sister's arrival, and how that went. His wife of 30 years, he had told me, has been trying to find her own half-French and half-English half-siblings. That being half the reason, if not the entire reason, for which I am now slogging through my days, on half-power. Only the sun and my husband help, and when he is gone, even if only to work, there is no sunshine. Si je te prends dans mes bras, tu arrêtras de pleurer? he asks, with tenderness.

I can't promise.

Que dois-je faire pour que la douleur du passé passe? Je ne peux pas exciser cette partie de moi-même sans me faire plus de mal encore.

C'est le deuil qui fait le travail, he says. He is right. I know he is right.

I worked on that room, thinking of my father, imagining that he could he could see me and that he knew that I was making it for her arrival, shopping with care at IKEA for the little things that would make it more than clean, that would make it comfortable and welcoming. It was already incredible that she would be here in only days, only hours. It was incredible that she would be here at all, after 32 years, and the more incredible a thing, perhaps, the more it shouldn't be invited. Je suis convaincu que ça va t'aider à long terme même si cela t'a fait mal dans le présent.

I am still in the present, and I suppose that I am not the only one.

You were wrong. You always thought our father was weak, but it wasn't my mother who didn't want you at his funeral. It was his wish from his death bed.

The measure of pain felt can be taken in that inflicted. It's hard to think about the long term when every internal wound is opened and bleeding at once now, and loss and abandonment feels like the deepest, coldest water in which you have ever swum, leaving you heavy and senseless, the shores indistinct.

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell.

Tell me what you have done, and tell me you are sorry.

It wasn't enough to explain what was wrong with my father. What could a 16-year-old have done that was enough to merit that?

It's different in my case, said my son.

It is different. His father told me as soon as he learned I was pregnant for our child that he could not be a father. My father was my "Dad" until he decided -- or accepted -- not to be. There are many circumstances under which to not be a father in the face of being or becoming one. We will both have lived without fathers, in very different circumstances, and circumstances, like everything else in life, can change. Often, they must, and we must help one another as they do.

Tell me what you have done, and tell me you are sorry.

We cannot love and understand our father the same way, ever. We can only accept one another's right to her feelings and to the truth of her life. If we cannot accept that, we cannot be sisters, ever. We might not be able to accept that, ever. We haven't been able to now.

I thought I could. I learned that I couldn't. I am not wise. I only try to tell the truth, even when I oughtn't. I don't know better. All I want is the truth. I am not ready to save others from the pain I have felt. My father left me when I was old enough to know, and I did not deserve that; no child could.

That is the truth.

I will try tell you what I have done, and to be sorry.
....

Rhubarb strawberry still life

Pie with iris

Late, I'm late. As always. The house smells nicer, though.

Off to Paris with my pie.
....

On Broadway

I have to run to Florosny for stuff to kill the grubs (they're everywhere I haven't treated yet, feasting lustily on my plants) and a connector thing for the hose so I can water the bottom of the garden (the hydrangeas look like a sorry lot of thirsty, ignored plants, which they have been until I got busy down there yesterday, weeding and pruning), so I thought I'd leave some visual material of my previous number 2 subject matter (just after our renovations -- hold tight, we're supposedly live and online in July! -- and before the garden) -- Barack Obama turned POTUS and his Michelle, becoming in black and as First Lady.

The Republicans are just a little bit jealous because they wouldn't be able to get a table at Blue Hill. They don't serve Red Hill politicians.

Is the choice of a restaurant by that name loaded or what?

Also, I'm not sure Les Mis is still running now that they are out of office.

Oh, it's back, it seems. Since 2006. Running, perhaps, as recent US social commentary?

Of course, in true form, the Repugs are diverting attention from the significance of the Obama's evening out, beyond the critical importance of the First Couple supporting cultural expression and learning, namely, the subject of Joe Turner's play Come and Gone -- the scars left by slavery -- and the importance of the nation's first president with African ancestry and his wife, an African American, attending.

They're certainly also feeling a little hostile because they know their leaders would be pummeled with organically grown tomatoes anywhere near New York City, let alone Greenwich Village, while the Obamas are served them, and fiddleheads, with gratitude, joy and pride.

We might also mention the tiny little fact that if the Obamas have enjoyed, and perhaps even encouraged, the parallels with Camelot, there is a terrifyingly possible one they face with grace and courage, living publicly and beyond the protection of the White House walls and the limousine's bullet-proof windows to remain visible and participant role models and reminders that no one cannot become President or First Spouse if, as Michelle Obama tells an assembly of girls and young women in the UK on her first official visit to their school, they work hard, in school and after, and live with passion.

Keep on, Obamas.



I think I'll get a new dress and ask my husband to take me out tonight.
....

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.
....