Poem for Monday and Zoo Meerkats

Diary of a Church Mouse 

By John Betjeman

Here among long-discarded cassocks,

Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,

Here where the vicar never looks

I nibble through old service books.

Lean and alone I spend my days

Behind this Church of England baize.

I share my dark forgotten room

With two oil-lamps and half a broom.

The cleaner never bothers me,

So here I eat my frugal tea.

My bread is sawdust mixed with straw;

My jam is polish for the floor.

Christmas and Easter may be feasts

For congregations and for priests,

And so may Whitsun. All the same,

They do not fill my meagre frame.

For me the only feast at all

Is Autumn's Harvest Festival,

When I can satisfy my want

With ears of corn around the font.

I climb the eagle's brazen head

To burrow through a loaf of bread.

I scramble up the pulpit stair

And gnaw the marrows hanging there.

It is enjoyable to taste

These items ere they go to waste,

But how annoying when one finds

That other mice with pagan minds

Come into church my food to share

Who have no proper business there.

Two field mice who have no desire

To be baptized, invade the choir.

A large and most unfriendly rat

Comes in to see what we are at.

He says he thinks there is no God

And yet he comes ... it's rather odd.

This year he stole a sheaf of wheat

(It screened our special preacher's seat),

And prosperous mice from fields away

Come in to hear our organ play,

And under cover of its notes

Ate through the altar's sheaf of oats.

A Low Church mouse, who thinks that I

Am too papistical, and High,

Yet somehow doesn't think it wrong

To munch through Harvest Evensong,

While I, who starve the whole year through,

Must share my food with rodents who

Except at this time of the year

Not once inside the church appear.

Within the human world I know

Such goings-on could not be so,

For human beings only do

What their religion tells them to.

They read the Bible every day

And always, night and morning, pray,

And just like me, the good church mouse,

Worship each week in God's own house,

But all the same it's strange to me

How very full the church can be

With people I don't see at all

Except at Harvest Festival.

-------- 

We had gloomy skies and drizzle on Monday, which is fine since it was a laundry, chores, and computer day around here. We went for a walk in the rainy late afternoon to the beach, where even the geese had gone into hiding, though the ducks were asleep on the shore. When we got back, we ate dinner while watching Monday Night Football, which was unexpectedly exciting when Cincinnati's backup quarterback turned out to have an arm and then Trevor Lawrence was injured, so the game went into overtime before the Bengals won. 

Now we're watching the first episode of the second season of Slow Horses after having finished the first season, which I enjoyed much more than I was expecting -- Gary Oldman is an awful person (spousal abuse and anti-Semitic rants are just a couple of his more charming attributes) but he is undeniably brilliant in this, and Kristin Scott Thomas is also terrific (and a Polanski defender, so also not one of my favorite people). Here's the meerkat family we met at the National Zoo last month when we were in DC:

Poem for Tuesday and Great Cats

Poem 

By William Carlos Williams

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloset—

first the right

forefoot

carefully

then the hind

stepped down

into the round

of the empty

flowerpot.

-------- 

It will surprise no one to hear that my Tuesday involved a huge amount of unpacking, laundry, and sorting things that had been in toiletry and snack bags. I did get to watch Voyager's "Pathfinder" with most of my usual crowd (I hadn't remembered the details and there was more Deanna Troi than I'd thought, which was nice), and our neighbors stopped by to return our key so we also gave them gifts and they got to snuggle the cats. 

In the evening I had a bunch of computer cleanup stuff to do, so we caught up on the finale of Lessons in Chemistry, which I thought was excellent throughout. We also watched last week's For All Mankind -- Mars is depressing, and I'm actually more worried about Ed than Margo. Since our own cats are claiming starvation again, here are some of the cats we saw at the National Zoo (sand, fishing, clouded, pallas, cheetah, lions and tigers):

Greetings from the Zoo

Adam had plans downtown with friends all day Saturday -- brunch with one, climbing with another, dinner with another, then a concert by yet another with a group -- so the rest of us went downtown with Cheryl, who drove up for the day to see me. We went to the zoo, since Cahaya was hoping to see the wolves, but of course the wolves were the one animal not on exhibit; nevertheless, we got to see the baby Andean bears climbing a tree, the baby meerkats wrestling, the elephants indoors and out, the sleepy Pallas and sand cats, the playful sea lions and otters, and all the animals in Amazonia and the Small Mammal House. 

We ran out of time for the rebuilt Bird House, but we got to see most of the zoo lights set up for the evening and we ate lunch in the Mane Grill, which wasn't crowded by the time we got there and which has Impossible Burgers as well as non-veggie stuff. When the zoo closed, we went to Barbarian Comics so Cheryl and I could check out all the Loki statues and Daniel could get Pokemon cards for Cahaya, then we went to Barnes & Noble at Washingtonian and walked by the lake to see the holiday lights. Cheryl had to get home afterward, so the rest of us ate some leftovers and some delivery for dinner while watching the end of the day's football -- go Terps!

Greetings from Chaos

The packers are coming on Thursday, and all my belongings go into suspension for a couple of weeks while they move across the country to Seattle. So my entire day was about packing, including the hour I spent talking to my high school friends at lunchtime when I was wrapping up ceramic magnets and ornaments around my desk, plus the two hours I spent watching The Masked Singer and then The Mandalorian long-distance with . I saw several neighbors as we gave away toys we'd forgotten we had in the house and sent another big donation to AmVets. From the small mammal house at the National Zoo last week: 

Greetings from the National Zoo

Cahaya had to work most of Thursday, so the rest of us met in the late morning downtown to go to the National Zoo. It was an 85-degree day and though there was rain in the forecast, it didn't arrive till late afternoon, so we had several hours to walk nearly the entire zoo, and though we couldn't get in to the renovated bird house, we got to participate in a bird training event outside and to see everything from the pandas to the sea lions to the spoonbills. 

 

We went to California Tortilla for lunch, came back to the house to sort books and stuffed animals, then went to pick up Cahaya downtown and ended up having dinner at the excellent Mexican restaurant Mi Vida. Then Daniel and Cahaya went back to their hotel, Adam went out with a friend from high school, and I got onto my Thursday night friend chat on Zoom only a little bit late. Now we're watching the Dodgers game waiting for Adam to get back.

Poem for Friday and Puffy Zoo Lights

Wild Animals
By Elizabeth Fleming

I like a mouse
When he’s not in my house,
And a rat
When he goes nibble, nibble, like that.
I like a mole; he’s a kind little soul,
And a stoat
With a smudge like snow on his throat.
I like a shrew
With his nose in the dew,
And a hare,
For he leaps and runs everywhere;
I like a fox
With his little white socks,
And rabbits and squirrels and other brown things.
I’m in love with them all,
So funny and furry and furtive and frightened and small. 

-------- 

The weather on Thursday ranged from pouring rain to torrential rain, though it wasn't bitterly cold -- that is arriving tomorrow, along with potential ice problems. So it'll be a couple of quiet in-the-house days! I did chores in the morning so that I could again watch two episodes of Good Omens on an Amazon viewing party with Kristen, which I haven't rewatched in over a year and really it has no equals besides Our Flag Means Death (Crowley looks at Aziraphale the same way Ed looks at Stede). 

The men in my family are all working on holiday cookies and were exchanging recipes, to which I had nothing useful to contribute. We had Indian food for dinner and watched both the beginning and the end of the Jets-Jaguars game around my usual Thursday night call, which was missing several people (one at a play, one with a cold, one about to have surgery, and one AWOL). The National Zoo has awesome new inflatable designs since we last went to Zoo Lights, so here are some of the ones we saw last night: 

Greetings from the National Zoo

Quickie after an evening visit to the National Zoo's Zoo Lights, which we haven't visited since a couple of years before the pandemic (last time, the reptile house was open -- this time the only animals we saw were orangutans through the windows of the great ape house). But it was awesome, and we went with Kay, whom I'd already spoken to earlier on a Zoom call with our two good high school friends.

Then I watched two episodes of Good Omens on an Amazon viewing party with Kristen before we went to the lights -- Paul got the tickets, which are free but have to be reserved, and he accidentally asked for four instead of two, hence the delightful surprise of Kay coming with us. Evening TV on the longest night of the year has been Disney's National Treasure and Willow, both a bit silly but nostalgic and fun!