Is it me or are the chickens getting surprisingly sophisticated? Makes me
wonder about safety. After those white tigers killed their keeper, one can’t
be too careful. I’m keeping my eye out for signs of a coup. Don’t want to
finish up like the grass some elephants trod on.
“What is the difference,” I asked the girls, “between the water of life and the
essence?”
Mimo was quite certain, “One and the same.”
“Oh ho,” says I, expecting to enjoy a captive audience, “one is a translation
from Gaelic and one from Arabic.”
Appenzeller wanted to know how many “ics” there are in the world.
Pecorino said that’s where the word “icky” comes from. Before I knew it we
were far from my original question and goal. I waited my moment to reveal that
the word “whisky” comes to us from the Gaelic phrase, “the water of life,” and
alcohol derives from Arabic for “the essence.” That moment never arrived. The
chickens asked what the soccer score was and our conversation was diverted
towards what is wrong with Holland?
After a run Hamish likes to drink from puddles or the water we put out for the
cats and the chickens. I asked why, hoping to find an opening to tell him what
I’d discovered about Arabs and “the essence” and to enjoy conjecture about a
jealous monotheistic god insisting people give up essence, by which I mean
drink. We could then have wondered how you get from alcohol to petrol, which
English word is derived from Medieval Latin and French. Which would have
brought us to the issue of why the French refer to “essence” when they could
use their own earlier term, “pétrol”? (There’s some joke to be had here about
existence of fuel preceding essence, but I can’t squeeze it out.)
Hamish, “Well, outside water is so much more complex than inside water…no
offense intended.”
“None taken. It comes from the same source you know, the chickens’ water. All
faucets hereabouts are connected.”
“Yes but outside water has the advantage of terroire.”
“Terroire?”
“The earthiness, the algae, the little bits that drop from trees; they
overwhelm the awful smell of indoor water.”
“What does indoor water smell of?”
“Cleaning fluids. Chlorine.”
“Aren’t those complex?”
“You have a point. To each his taste.”
English Shepherds can be surprisingly tactful dogs. Except where squirrels are
concerned.
There are flies outside our house. No corpse or other decaying being attracts
them. Well, maybe some dead slugs, but observation suggests that the flies are
simply patrolling in hope, hanging in the air like one of Damon Runyan’s
characters who tarried near where the big potatoes were in case a little potato
may choose to roll his way. I asked the chickens what they thought.
“The real attraction of drama,” Mimo opined, “is sharing a common predicament
with the playwright. Flies bring us together.”
I had to ask, “Do you see some possibility of writing a play about flies?”
Appenzeller thought I was missing the point. “Write a play? We can’t scratch
our names in dirt.”
Mimo, "We’re none of us John Paul Sartre, you know.”
All in unison, “No, no. Drama ignoramuses, us.”
Pecorino, “But we’ve a pretty deep vita when it comes to flies.”
“Is ‘deep’ a word you'd use to describe a vita?” I mused.
“I just did.”
David Ritchie,
Portland,
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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