In the Mood

In 1981 I was a vintage girl. Totally. My clothes, music and above all my dancing style were straight out of 1939. My wardrobe teemed with circle skirts; their crescent edges cascaded like sequined corollas over my more normal garb.  My thinking was if it won’t twirl up to your eyebrows on the triple spins, it’s just not hanger worthy.  While my days, working as a Zoo. Keeper, were filled with goat parts and various degrees of muck and dust -- muck in the Seattle rain and dust filled with ungulate hair in the rare Northwest sun -- at sundown I transformed myself into a Ginger Rogers clone from tip to toe.  It was a double life and like all such forays into a mirrored existence it had it’s moments of both the sublime and the ridiculous, the dichotomies of male and female -- night and day.

In the day I trudged on in a vaguely androgynous way but at night I was light as a feather and no one, ever, called me mister.  I suppose if I had been allowed to wear a strapless evening gown while mucking out stalls I would not have had the problem of people asking me, “Hey Mister, Where’s the Seal Pool”, but my Zoo uniform, a riot of beige understatement reminiscent of the duds of a transvestite service station attendant, doomed me to an image of male drone status par excellence.  So I compensated at night.  I suppose some might even say -- over compensated.  But then, it is well know that that whole Stoic/Republican routine of moderation in all things”   yada, yada, is only a ploy to keep most folks minds off love and pain and death and  instead save money for bogus causes and keep out of trouble, in other words -- to not have any darn fun at all.

Where was I, O Yes, frozen sperm.  Why is it that Republicans always seem like an acceptable segue to frozen sperm?  

I was living on borrowed time with my gritty-goat versus glittered-glove existence.  I could feel these worlds coming closer and closer in a scary ‘When Worlds Collide’ kind of way.  Then, one night, they merged completely.

This came about through a deceptively innocent senario. At the Zoo my favorite goat was named Eris, the ‘Goddess of Discord’, and we Zoo folk wanted to get her in a family way.  Not wanting to endure the various difficulties involved with attempting this along normal, biological lines we had arranged for her to be artificially inseminated.  My job as a zoo keeper was to monitor her estrus cycle to determine the optimum time for the A.I. act to occur.  This involved noting her amorous behavior i.e. mounting of other goats in fruitless and delusional reproductive activity and gathering her mucus for stretching.  You can probably envision the mounting but mucus stretching is kind of hard to describe in a delicate fashion.  Basically, you collect some mucus from the goats nether regions on your thumb and forefinger and then stretch it between them like transparent gum.  If you can achieve 2 inches without breaking, eureka, ovulation will occur in approximately 12 hours.  (That’s 12 hours to ‘making baby goat time.’) Well, after noting and gathering and stretching one day the optimum baby attempting time was estimated to be at 12:30 AM that evening.  Of course I had a dance to go to that night and a new gold lame dress made from a 50’s pattern with a huge circle skirt that I was dying to try out so that’s how I ended up past midnite in my rubber boots, gold lame bunched up above my knees with a glass speculum in my hand and a frozen sperm straw warming up in my décolletage.  Quite a picture.  Steady as she goes goat-wise, three cervical rings breached, one squirt and -- bing, bang, boom, AI achieved!

Five months later, TWIN goat girls.  I was allowed the privilege of naming them.  Felicia and Fi Fi were the the cutest things on the planet.  This was the last time I was allowed to name anything, but I did not care I because I had become a father in a gold lame dress.  What a relief it was to scratch that one off my life list.  

This story is finished but it  has gotten me into a mood to try on that old lame dress and a few other accessories from the past.  I’ll sign off now and slip into something nostalgic.  I just can’t keep on writing, when I get, in the mood. 

   

© Robin Wendell 2009

Speaking of Goats

Woodland Park Zoo 1982, Fair in the Farm - Robin Wendell, Ernie Rose & goat Eris

I’ve noticed some people out there, on the internet, and elsewhere yammering on, in what I am sure are very well meaning ways, about how to have a happy in life.  Some would lead you to believe that an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from psychology, astrology, numerology, the I Ching, tarot, plus a smattering of Sanskrit and the lost art of paper folding are absolute necessities. I have nothing at all against any of these studies to provide illumination or guidance in life, I does bother me though when some folks act like their personal system, new age or traditional, has all the answers.  Frankly that gets my goat.

Speaking of goats, I used to work at a Zoo. In the course of my duties, which, contrary to public opinion, were not at all glamorous, and consisted mostly of scraping fecal matter off various surfaces, I have been bitten by a tiger, chased by a giraffe, and have attempted to appear calm and cheerful before the public while bats crawled up my legs.  I also have been stepped on, butted and had a significant portion of my hair chewed off by the species, Capra hircus.  In other words, there is hope.  I know the heights and depths of one of the best self-help aides available to man -- I know goats.

Let me say at the start that I know that goats are not human.  Most animal management types scorn an anthropomorphic attitude -- baby gorillas in little pink tutus -- ugh.  However anyone observing a group of animals for an extended period of time will notice that there is a specific energy that is manifested by a particular species.  This energy is in a pure form; that is, unlike your standard human, a goat doesn’t need a nervous breakdown to know something is wrong or a psychologist to fix it.  This is because they do naturally what we humans find so difficult -- they live and feel and act smack-dab in the present.  No lingering doubts regarding the moldy alfalfa of yesterday taints their enjoyment of todays repast.  

A typical day at the Zoo would start by me letting the animals out into the yards.  I would sometimes let the sheep out first, before the goats, because that would be the only peace the poor things had all day.  Once those goat hooves hit the tarmac it was all over.  In three-seconds-flat they would evaluate the various potentialities for food, shelter, and opportunities to get into trouble and then claimed them for their own.  Their modus operandi for achieving these aims was brute force and intimidation.  Goats are not subtle.  Their idea of a good time is to hit something with their heads until it does what they want.  Once outside, they would often form a charming tableau on a large rock pile where they would keep one eye on the sheep flock to make sure they were reasonably miserable, and then scan the pathways looking for children or feeble adults so they could snatch food, cameras or articles of clothing, which they would then eat trample or shred.  Their attitude during this activity was gleeful enjoyment.  No guilt or hesitation, just pure impulsive action.

Even when the goats were at rest, gnawing on a light meter or a baby bottle they remained alert to any and all possibilities for adventure.  One of their favorite pursuits was the constant assault on gates and fences.  Goats can open fences that would have baffled Houdini.  I suspect they have prehensile lips.  This talent resulted in many goat escapades into obscure and unprotected buildings where they would terrorize rabbits, chickens and other small animals and eat inappropriate food stuffs that caused them to bloat up like the balloons in Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade.  

Our goats were sturdy, graceful and quick.  Even though they appeared to be built entirely of angles, like a box with legs, they could balance on a bolder, sideswipe a sheep, and keep an eye open for dropped candy bars, all with apparently effortless grace.  However, if you tried to lead them in a direction that was not of their choosing, they had this trick they did with their torso and leg muscles that quite effectively glued them to the ground, immovable by anything less than a small forklift.  

Most of all the goats were the masters of endurance.  Hot and cold weather, unusual food, getting along with their peers, they either put up with it or assimilated it to produce more of their specialty -- obnoxious, but most of the time, irresistible goat behavior.

So, how does help me understand life?  Well, for one thing, I can see now how some ‘top of the heap’ kinds of folks combine a need for no restraints on their own whimsical behavior  with a need to be in control of others at all times. Also their need to think they have all the answers.  Perhaps when the next authority figure is kind enough to clue me into the “real” facts of life I can just look for the goat eyes behind their persona and consider their own fears or a need for liberation.  It seems significant that it was always the goats, who were so obsessed with keeping the sheep in line, that were long gone when we found the hasp undone and the gate to the yard was open.  

So the pundits and proselytizers can continue to pontificate but they won't seem quite so irritating any more.  Maybe they just haven't learned the true meaning of the word - capricious.  They could learn a lesson from my favorite goat “Eris”, on how to caper though life with a little more grace.  Next time one of them crosses my path I will look past them to see her, standing at the top of her rock pile, surveying the possibilities of leadership and obnoxiousness. The epitome of ambition, persistence and block-headed obstinacy the light in her eyes at the sight of a helpless child with a cookie was both instant and inevitable.  She thought she was right -- not because the sheep or other  people were wrong, but because she knew how to both endure and to still have fun. She was no respecter of persons and yet there was not a malicious bone in her whole rambunctious body. I can’t help but imagine that if someday they drop the big one and most of humanity is reduced to smoking slime, that through the clearing smoke we will see familiar shape emerge-- Eris on her charred rock pile.  Around her all the fences will be blown down and with a gleam in her eye she will leap down and conquer the world.

©copyright Robin Wendell 2009