If you thought Dickens was bad with goofy names, go check this site with the names of actual physicians that match their specialties well: http://educ.ahsl.arizona.edu/mla/doctor.htm.

I came across it while doing reseach at work. Who says medical publishing can't be fun?

Well, my kitten just threw me for a loop.

I was rubbing the plump, fluffy, black tummy of my 3-month-old kitten when I noticed that he has teats! My SIL had his gender identified by a vet, and he's beginning to get what look like boy parts, so this was something of a shock. I checked out my clearly male dog Nicky--no teats. But Keats has 6. Hmmm...off we went to search the answer on the Internet.

His parts matched the pictures of boy kitties. But one site gave us the answer: boy cats do indeed have teats, just like boy humans. They just never become anything but pink bumps. Mystery solved! No need to change the poor guy's name to something feminine--a very good thing because he actually comes when you call, and usually obeys when you say "Keats, no." I think living with a dog is making him think like a dog, instead of being incorrigibly feline and above obeying stupid humans. ;-)

Time to go calligraphy the place cards for turkey day. We will have a full house with 7 guests.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Earlier this week, I went to the Thomas Eakins exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The best time to go is apparently on a weekday afternoon, if you can squeak in between school groups.

One of the reasons Eakins is such a convincing realist was his dedication to "getting it right." He would paint several studies, and even sculpt clay models to perfect the composition and perspective. I was especially impressed with a painting he did of a rower on the Schuylkill River, in which the front of the boat is coming straight at the viewer. Next to it in the exhibit is Eakin's study for the painting, and elaborate grid of lines he used to formulate the perspective.

Eakins also did many of his paintings from photographs--typically combining figures from several pictures into the final painting. The result is incredibly natural poses.

Eakins' emphasis on the human figure as the basis of art got him into trouble, however. He brought in a man to model nude for a class with both male and female students and got kicked out of the PA Academy of Fine Arts. He formed a rival school with likeminded artists and he and his students were in a lot of nudie photos they later painted from. After seeing this exhibit, you'll be intimately acquainted with Eakins. Hee hee.

I just finished the first volume of Susan Howatch's The Wheel of Fortune (It has nothing to do with the game show, but rather a notion of the philosopher Boethius). It's the tenth book of Howatch's I've read, after the six Starbridge books, the two healing centre books and Sins of the Fathers.

Published in 1984, prior to the Starbridge series, The Wheel of Fortune has many of the element that made the Starbridge books so great: psychologically complex characters so full of self-delusion they make bad choices, yet once you understand how they tick, you can't help but root for them and hope they can sort out their messes.

The focus of this novel is a wealthy Welsh/English landowning family. They're struggling with the aftermath of scandal and downright evil in the grandparents' generation. One of Howatch's great themes comes out here as in most of her other novels: "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children." Yet this is not because of God's vindictiveness, but the natural consequence of evil in family dynamics. It's powerful because it rings so true emotionally. We see this in our own world: "When the parents go off the rails, it's the children that suffer most," one of the characters says.

But there's also a beauty to how the generations are innerconnected. This quote in particular brought that home to me:

"When I was two," she said, "my father died in the Boer War. I have no memory of him. I thought later, How sad I can't remember him, can't grieve as I should--for of course to me he wasn't a hero, he was just someone who'd gone away and left us, and I resented him for being killed and then I felt guilty that I resented him, and what with all the resentment and the guilt I never thought that the grief would come, I thought I'd never hear his echo in time, and indeed I forgot all about grieving, but gradually, as I grew up, other people would talk to me about him, and I thought, Why do they do this, what makes them speak now after so many years, and then suddenly I realized it was because of me, because I was the echo for those people, and for them the past wan't lost far away down the straight line after all but coming back towards them in a curve. It was as if he was still alive, for when they looked at me they saw him, and when I understood this, when I understood he was present in me, then I knew him, then he became real to me, then the resentment died and the guilt fell away and at last, years after his death, I was able to grieve."

I'm sorry to have to take a hiatus from South Wales while I read a book for a book club (Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow). I'd especially been enjoying the "visit" to Rhossili Downs, a place I'd spent a week while studying abroad in 1990. We'll see if I can be disciplined and wait to read volume 2.

I've had calliope music running through my head for hours and hours. For some strange reason, my heart is in the land of carousels. My favorite is in a backwater amusement park in central PA, Knoebel's Grove. The magnificent carousel there dates from the early 1900s, with some of the most beautifully hand-carved, bejeweled horses I've ever been astride. My dad's company held its company picnic there every August, and as company kids, we got enough free tickets to ride rides all day. My day was not complete without at least 10 go-rounds on the carousel.

The teens always took the outside horses and competed for the elusive brass ring. I preferred a steed that went up and down. I picked my mount very carefully, never content with a plain brown horse. I wanted the midnight black horse with medieval armour and the most lush real-horsehair tail, or a cream-colored pony with delicate grey hooves, or one of countless other "favorites." The brassy, quasi-military, old-timey music seemed of another world altogether, from a time before tv, when the simple pleasures were magic. What was it like to be a little girl in 1910?

My favorite part of the movie "Mary Poppins" is when the carousel horses carry Mary, Bert, Michael and Jane bouncing off into the countryside. What a lark! If I had three wishes, I'd probably waste one of them to gain such a steed.

If you're ever in central PA in the summer, you've got to visit Knoebels. Even going back as an adult, I find it hasn't lost its innocent power. Tucked in the woods, dotted with picnic groves (they actually let you bring your own food), scattered with fun rides (and cheap!! $15 worth of tickets will last two adults all day), and full of kitschy eateries with all manner of tempting junk, it is, according to my husband, home of two of the BEST wooden roller coasters.

Bulb planting is not for the faithless. Up to my elbows in the dirt yesterday afternoon, I contemplated this while pushing past cracklingly dry leaves to find earth. How is it that my bags of oniony little bulbs thrive in the midst of death? It's a mystery that they can gather strength and sustenance from the snow that will pack them in, the Canadian blasts that will howl overhead. When the ground is still cold, they'll send up shoots and tiny blossoms, the first sign of new life, heaved up from under the snow.

When you're childless, you cling to such metaphors. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the end result of being in this dark place will be new life springing up, like a soft, baby-pink tulip.

God is here in the dark, pulling roots and stems from the bulb--potentiality. Though it cannot be perceived, He works, pulls, shapes, molds, forms, while I wait for spring.

Lone xylophone, I realize, is a kind of odd name for a blog, and merits explanation...

My sophomore through senior years of high school, I played mallet percussion, an experience that put me in an even more freakish subset of band freaks: girl percussionists. I didn't play something delicate and feminine like a flute or clarinet, but a huge instrument that had to be strapped to my body. I carried sticks and hit things.

Being a girl percussionist is not for wussies. I got to wear a 40-pound marching xylophone through blazing heat, rain, and snow on football fields and several-mile parades in hilly towns. (I only fainted once, during a two mile parade in 98 degree heat in a wool uniform. Fortunately, a parent caught my instrument before I was impaled on the harness.)

My band director decided that the percussion harnesses were ugly, so we had to wear them under our uniforms. It's amazing I ever got a date, wandering around football games with lumpy shoulders, bolts bulging at unnatural places on my chest and a steel bar sticking out by my groin. Of course, with the instrument attached I could do some serious damage if I turned around too fast--and did knock the wind out of a trombonist...

I'll save some of my crazy band days stories for future posts. Suffice it to say, my experiences shaped my imagination in unique ways, and I can hear beauty in hitting things, see dignity in the lumpy but strong.

Now I've been lured into this self-indulgent abyss. Christe eleison.