Divination 101 (Coz)

Dear Coz,

Without preamble:

22 ottobre--I find on the front porch a Black Cat, just run over, her left arm broken through and dangling;
25 ottobre--in bottom of coffee cup, a man having assumed the position;
26 ottobre--in bottom of coffee cup, headless and armless female torso;
26 ottobre--tea bag ruptured, on rim of cup, the Grim;
27 ottobre--on walk to stables, the Grim, eyes glaring like hot coals in the Sun, appears in 100plus pounds of ravening blackness on the edge of the maize field; that evening, Blood on the Moon;
29 ottobre--in bottom of cup, tombstone with a Bird engraved thereon; on rim of cup, a Cat, its kidneys being devoured by a Dog, its head by something more monstrous than the Grim itself;
30 ottobre--nightmare of the Tyrannosaurus Rex poking its nose in through the window under which I’m hiding;
31 ottobre--a Skull in the bottom of my cup, Sandy identified it without prompting, it was smoking a cigar.

My question to you, my clairvoyant Cousin, is this: do you see a pattern here?

§

O Lordy, it’s just a Three Stooges blowout, "Moe, I’m haunted!"

Happy Hallowe’en!

Allegro Ognisanti!

Buenos Dias de los Muertos! (Whose bright idea was it to hold elections on the Day of the Dead?)

§§§§§

What me, worry?

For I have me an orange and aniseseed flavoured chico muerto from the Sri Lankan Mexican Patisserie, gobble gobble gobble . . . .

Your Cousin, Giac.

Naming the Names (Piers)

Dear Little Pup,
° Today, at last, you are old enough to vote, to drink a martini, to be drafted and sent to rot in Viet Nam. At least you are if I’ve properly understood the nonlinearity of time in What the %?! Do We Know?! starring Marlee Matlin and Buffy’s most weaselly principal.
° Yes, another birthday, what will the new year bring?
° Well I have been telling you for three months at least and do not hesitate to do so again.
° Piers is in the ascendant, no stopping you.
° How do I know what I know? Because, unlike Gualtiero the Psychic, who parried my dull witticism with "I’m a psychic, not a mindreader," I, Giac, can foretell the future.
° I shall prove it.
° Next week the Pisces horoscope will read: "Fortune smiles upon you; if you know where to look, you can find a premasticated chaw of tobacco."
° Next week Libra will read: "You will get a surprise phone call from your greatuncle’s lawyer informing you that you have just inherited controlling interest in Microsoft."
° The following week Pisces will be: "Fortune frowns upon you, the Surgeon General has determined that sucking on used chaws of tobacco is hazardous to one’s health and, moreover, stains the teeth."
° While Libra, and Virgo, and Capricorn, and Taurus--just Love and Money and Acclaim and crisp curly frenchfries raining down from Heaven.
° For every astrologer, even Brezsny, gets tired toward the bottom of the list.

§

Each of us has a name given by God and given by our parents.
Each of us has a name given by our sins and by our longing.
Each of us has a name given by our enemies and by our love.
Each of us has a name given by our celebrations and by our work.
Each of us has a name given by the sea and by the stars.
--Zelda Mishkovsky--

° To which Brezsny adds, "Your homework for the coming week, Libra, is to figure out all ten names . . . . your sense of self is ready to bloom."
° Well, Little Pup, I know very well that you are presently engaged in the struggle to convince your choristers that when Duruflé writes A he means A and not A- nor, improbably, A+. Just because a Requiem is for the Dead doesn’t mean nobody’s listening.
° So I shall help you with your homework.

Iddio ti regalò il nome "Orfeo."
I tuoi genitori ti regalarono il nome "Capace."
I tuoi peccati, che, secondo me, non esisteranno, ti nominò "F-----o."
Il tuo desiderio ti chiama "Calvin H. Rutter."
I tuoi nemici t’hanno chiamato, nel mio sentire, "Junior."
Iddia Venere abitualmente ti chiama "Montecchino."
Alle celebrazioni sei "Maestro."
Il tuo lavoro, secondo Vittoria, ti conosce come "Signor J----."
Il mare (nel quale nuotano i Pesci) . . . . ?
Gli astri ti acclamano "Il Violinista," cioè di nuovo, "Orfeo," perchè sei tu attorno a cui noi tutti ci congreghiamo, noi Lupi (io, Nathan, Cugino Zingaro, Bastien, Richmond, il Tush Hog), loro Pecora (chi sarà, sarà).

For, as you must have seen at once, I misinterpreted the figure on the rim of the cup, I blame Coz for not reading my mind and correcting me.
° And so, happy birthday, Little Pup.
° Vote, imbibe, dodge.

§§§§§

° Poor Father Ferret, poor Bishop Weasel, Wo sollen sie fliehen hin?
° Apologise, demandeth the Anglican Council of Binitarian Bishops (for they all deny the effective existence of the Holy Spirit), for elevating Bishop Robinson, resign your bishopricks and priesthoods and pensions (or at least "your official positions"), then sign a bloodoath supporting the 3000yearold JudaeoChristianIslamick genocide against the Venusian people.
° Poor Father Ferret, poor Bishop Weasel, wo sollen sie fliehen hin?

° Slavering all over my long sharp teeth, I am

° Your Giac.

P.S. You understand, of course, the good fortune that the Black Cat dwelling under Romaine Chapel promises to one and all? Ask Coz. And yet there are those who wish her ill. Not Vittoria, one of the littlest of these thy charges. She actually got the gorgeous feral Shecat into her van, where Kitty scratched the daylights out of her arm and bit her on the face. Vittoria loves Kitty just the same. The threat to Kitty’s wellbeing, and to the Good Fortune of Assumption, is from the overthirties. Isn’t that always the way!

Sour Milk (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,

° I reckon you already know how to clabber milk. No, I don't refer to your famous childhood singing voice, but to your mother's home economics lore.

° I shall remind you just the same.

° Place into a measuring cup:

1.33 Tablespoons (white, so as not to discolour the batter) vinegar

or

1.5 T lemon juice

or

.25 Cup (4 T) grapefruit juice

or

.75 Cup (12 T) orange juice,

then fill the cup with as much sweet milk as needed to produce the quantity of sour milk required for the recipe. Mix well.--Successful Baking for Flavor and Texture, 1936, Arm & Hammer, Cow Brand.

° Or else, next time your refrigerator begins to run constantly and, notwithstanding, the ice and frozen foods thaw, hope for the best for three or four days, then eccolo! real homemade natural sour milk.

§

° Of course the reason you will want to sour some milk is to bake my greatgrandmother Mammie H-----'s Sour Milk Gingerbread, which you have decided to feature at the b & b.

° Here is the 1890's recipe:

Combine

.25 Cup Larkin Cooking Oil

1 heaping Cup sugar

1 egg.

Beat very light, add

.5 Cup molasses.

Sift together

1.75 Cups flour

2 teaspoons ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

.5 teaspoon salt

.5 teaspoon soda.

Add dry ingredients to egg mixture alternately with

.5 Cup sour milk.

Mix, turn into oiled and floured pan, bake 40 minutes at 350°.

° Delicious.

§

° Delicious.

° Yet Aunt O--- updated and enriched the recipe about 1950. (For you can google Larkin Cooking Oil all you want and never come up with so much as a cracked collector's bottle, the rancid contents all leaked out.)

Combine

.5 Cup (Mazola) corn oil

1 heaping Cup white sugar

2 freerange eggs.

Beat very light, add

.5 Cup molasses.

Sift together

2 Cups plain flour

2 "kind of" heaped teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

.5 teaspoon salt

.5 level teaspoon soda.

Add dry ingredients to egg mixture alternately with

.5 Big Cup buttermilk.

Mix, then pour into oiled and floured pan. Bake at 350° for up to 40 minutes, depending on oven.

"It is very delicious, better kept 2 or 3 days--but good fresh." So said Aunt O---.

§

° Very delicious.

° No doubt.

° Dunno.

° For I butter and flour the 9x13 pan (remember to roll the rather liquid batter up the sides, for the bread rises right smart), and I "kind of" heap the cinnamon too. And I use low cholesterol eggs from vegetarian chickens, poor little fowl, never to know the joy of chasing a grasshopper across the front yard and pecking it, the hopper, into crackly crispy little bits.

° Nor does my 350° oven take more than 30 to 35 minutes to bake.

° I do use regulation measuring cup and spoons, a practise to which neither Aunt O--- nor my mother ever stooped.

§

° So, plus butterfat on the pan, minus butterfat because the sourmilk used to be whole milk, plus cholesterol because of the second egg, minus cholesterol because of the vegan chickens . . . .

° So what, 'cause I top the whole thing, while still warm from the oven, with the following buttermilk icing:

Melt

1 stick butter.

Add

1 Cup sugar

.5 Cup buttermilk

.5 teaspoon soda

1 Tablespoon honey (or corn syrup or molasses)

.5 teaspoon vanilla

.25 Cup shaved crystallised ginger root (optional, to taste).

Bring to a hard boil. When you feel like it's ready (when it has begun to brown and to smell irresistible), remove from heat, beat till foam disappears, pour over gingerbread.

This gingerbread will keep, covered, under refrigeration, for a good two weeks without appreciable staleness.

° Very delicious, I tried it on Nathan.

§

° Very delicious.

° Although, as you remark, it turns out differently each time one makes it. Longer baking yields a dry bread that contrasts better with the topping. Shorter baking seems to emphasise the ginger. Overboiling the topping, past the moment of greatest fragrance, makes a chewier topping (a plus) with less butterscotch flavour (a minus). Honey makes a contrast, molasses a complement. Corn syrup adds yet more vanilla.

° Nathan agrees with you, he'd like even more ginger flavour. Just heap it to heart's content, says I.

° Or buy a fresh bottle.

° Nudge it this way or that, suit yourself.

§§§§§

° Look at the parsimony of the ingredients in the 1890 version. One egg. Sourmilk used not as trendy frippery, but because springrefrigerated milk was forever souring back then. And the ginger helped conceal whatever skankiness the baking soda was unable to neutralise.

° Look at the prosperity of 1950. Two huge brownshelled eggs. More oil, more flour, more ginger, more more more. And buttermilk, marketed on purpose, could be bought at the grocery store. Sorghum (real) molasses was still boiled down locally, so Aunt O--- had no need to rejigger the recipe for storeboughten dark brown sugar.

° Look at the effeminate and pansyassed--o wait, that's our generation. Too lazy to rewarm the gingerbread in the oven and serve with melted butter, too cowardly to heap cold gingerbread with heartclogging freshly whipped cream (and I'm the last human in the western world who still uses a Julia Child whip, no electricity for me! And that aerosol junk, like Burma Shave!). So my added topping prebutters the gingerbread, cholesterol out of sight, cholesterol out of mind.

° Mammie H----- and Aunt O--- are just guffawing in their graves.

° Confectionately, Giac.

Horse Whispering (Coz)

Dear Coz,

° I was toddling down the lane the other evening on the way to nowhere when I found that the drastically shortened day (pace Jean Giono) was aiming the full force of the setting Sun into my eyes. So, unmanlike, I turned and went the other way.

° Was this a Susyn Reeve (like) leading?

° We shall see.

° Due East, under the trestle where the warmth radiating from the southfacing concrete pier was very pleasant, out past the dried and unharvested maize fields, over the creek--and there on the sandbar, aka the regional recycling center, there was a whole hotel lobby of sofas, so inviting, with the mosquitoes and all; and a man making a bonfire of--no, in fact he was unmaking one, he was rescuing useable lumber from somebody else's refuse. Well, past the creek, and I was just trying to espy the solitary roadside plant of bearsfoot, to see if it was still in bloom and maybe I'd collect a seed or two, when there he was.

° Mr. Ed.

° No, but it was a highblooded, butchmaned chestnut stallion grazing placidly on the verge of the highway. Not a heavily travelled highway, but still--in a collision he was sure to be bruised.

° Giac to the ready.

° I detoured to the farmhouse and knocked. No answer. No lights. No chattering tv.

° I hallooed to the barn half a mile away. No answer.

° Well, there was an answer, half a pack of foxhounds came running as if I were the Purina Chow Boy.

° So, consequently, Giac retreating to the ready.

° I recrossed the highway, waved smilingly at a passing car--they were outlanders, and thought it all very picturesque--and drew nigh to Signor Cavallo. I mean to say, I stopped as soon as he lifted his head from the grass and glared at me, about 15 feet away, I reckon.

° "Shouldn't you go back to your field," I asked without a question mark, like some Witch from Dune. ((Scene 130 in link)) (Star Wars borrowed the conceit, don't know the ursource, one of the Oz books most likely.)

° The Horse shook his head, snuffled, then crossed the highway into the front yard of the farmhouse, where he commenced to crop the recently mown lawn.

° I followed to the steep bank above the yard. I looked at him. Have I got to do it all, I said to myself.

° Well of course.

° So down I scuffled, drat that bad knee. Same drawing nigh, till again he stopped browsing, lifted his head, glared at me.

° "I bet you remember where you got out," I said urgingly, for I myself couldn't see a single gate ajar, indeed I didn't even know which pasture he'd come from.

° Shake, snuffle; then he trotted, then galloped past the house, past the machinery shed, and jumped over a hurdle in the fence I hadn't even spotted. And lo, he was back where he belonged, and grazing and glaring at me all at the same time.

° I resumed my walk, five minutes deducted.

§

° Well it was a miracle, wasn't it?

° It was a miracle, because when I innocently recounted the story to Nathan, he was impressed, he wanted to study coffee scum right then and there.

° All Giac's tarotiness, attested by the Strayed Horse, Il Cavallo Traviato, just add him to your own antique deck.

§§§§§

° Well you, goatherd as you sometime were, are just chortling.

° For you know I left out of the story the one detail that kills the Magick.

° For, of course, each time after I spoke to The Horse, I took one meaningful step forward. And that was the entire trick, the entire whispering, the entire miracle of Man-Horse sympathy.

° I knew it would work, I knew what he wanted and what he did not want.

° Yet you'd be surprised how many folks who've never set foot in a town bigger than Kosciusko never learn the trick, they can't even whisper a nursing calf back to its mother.

° Your cousin, Giac.

Bastien and the Cowgoddess (Piers)

Dear Piers,

° It's just no use your peering around the column after the Sequence, in hopes of espying Bastien. Wasn't there, isn't there, won't be there, all your fault.

° For your ruse failed as it deserved to fail: it failed when Lucy tried it on Ricky, it failed when Don Porter tried it on Ann Sothern, it failed when Charlie Farrell applied it to Gale Storm, it failed--well when a trick fails even in '50's Hollywood, it has no chance at all in real life.

° It failed, your ruse, by succeeding. For, a couple of Sundays ago, when you stealthily set forward by 45 minutes not only Bastien's Patek Philippe, but also every freestanding timepiece in the flat clear down to the VCR, you did manage to trick him into arriving at Mass before the Introit.

° And what was the inevitable consequence of your cleverness?

° Why, the poor lad heard an entire homily, that's what.

° And once one has heard one of those clear through, no amount of Lucille Ball (sy) henna trickery will induce a bright unbleached blond to suffer another.

§

° What a homily! Good joke beginning, and not the one about the cat barking either. This time it was a cow barking. The OT was from Deuteronomy--what is that thing still doing in the Lectionary? Hasn't Moyses's childhood grudge against Hathor gone on long enough?-- I reckoned the theme was to be an admonition against worshipping golden calves. Don't know where I'd find one to worship, if so inclined. So that was that.

° Bimeby, as I gazed about listlessly, I was conscious that, in threequarter rear view, so that one cheekbone shows, Bastien is your spitting image. Even his crown is on the right, surely not a naturalborn lefty?

° And then for a while I examined folks' clothes. That awkward season, too early for the good wool, too late--well, there was one sixteenyearold in midanklelength cargo pants and a blue and pink and yellow Hawaiian coconutpalmandsurfboard print shirt, that was entertaining.

° And then for a while I drifted alongside Proust and Mozart. Dove sono? Dove, indeed. There's where the gentle and kindly woman who was dying of cancer all last year isn't sitting this year. There, down front, survives the nonagenarian exmodel, still very spiffy in this seasonally drab crowd. There, on the right, isn't the nervous youth who used to come for--well why did he come? Every few minutes he used to turn and peep at the entry, but no one ever came to join him, no one ever spoke to him, that I saw, even at the Peace. Pretty much just sat and peeped and started at creaks in the floorboards, poor little tyke. Gone for good, frightened or despaired.

° Rafe, emigrated to your aisle this year. Rafe, religiously scrupulous not to acknowledge, by any community action, the liturgy that interrupts the Pachelbel he's come to hear.

° Tevye, two yards and all seven planets from Rafe. Tevye and Miklos, puzzling out the slow Cheshire Cat (tish) dissolving of the sweetvoiced Cantor, was it the January Pansy Festival? Was it--?

° Near at hand, an exCouncil member, as immaculately groomed as the exmodel, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. tanned and handsome, drawing the lines on the children's ConnectaPicture--no, it was a crossword puzzle, ripped out of the morning paper.

° So many and so clever ways of coping with the long aimless verbal drift toward the Offertory. Puzzles, blind stares, abandonments of religion for good and all, gentle Sister Death herself, so many ways of coping.

° Yet Bastien, blond and stalwart, listened doggedly to it all.

§

° So he didn't jump halfway out of his seat, as I did, when the homily ended.

° With a bombshell.

° "Choose Life!" Out of the blue, just like that, "Choose Life!"

° I started just as the nervous little pansyflower used to, if only a greybeard medico cleared his throat behind him.

° "Choose Life!"?

° You mean to say the thing wasn't an attack on the Cowgoddess all along?

° You mean to say I was so lost in Mozartian space that I didn't register foetuses, bloody broken tornfleshed little foetuses, with fotos to illustrate?

° Good thing I wasn't solving a crossword puzzle, might've lost the preacher's thread altogether.

§§§§§

° But just because your stale clockstopping ruse won't work, it doesn't mean I can't tell you what will work. That's what I do best, spread contentment and resolve difficultnesses.

° Just program Blondello's cell phone to play Sanctus Bell at maximum volume. And slip the device under his pillow all unawares.

° Then, just before you cue up the Sanctus--that was a very amazing intonation of the Preface Sunday, Clergy been watching Weeping Camel, have they?--dial Bastien's number.

° I know his family's been lapsed since the loony Wesley brothers, well, since loony King Hank himself, but it's in the blood, like Pavlov's dogs. Dingalingaling . . . dingalingaling . . .dingalingaling--he'll fall off the bed smack dab onto his knees, the pain'll rouse him, the accurate clock'll shock him, he'll be showered and dressed and coming in the door just in time for the Dan Locklair Rubrics (V), Blues Bin Bloody Mary Brunch immediately following.

° Buon consiglio omnibus hominibus bonae voluntatis in questi giorni . . . .

° I hereby solemnly swear that I am up to no good, woof woof, Giac.

° P.S. Altar Guild? I know I not speak the English so good--the hours of revision these letters take, just to try to pass for--! But you can't honestly have imagined--!

In Festo S. Francisci

Alleluia, Alleluia.

Franciscus pauper et humilis,

coelum dives ingreditur,

hymnis coelestibus honoratur.

Alleluia.

How Not to French Kiss (Lad)

Dear Lad,

° O goody goody! said I to myself when the gospel was intoned, for it was the one that bids us all be wily as coyotes and crooked as snakes. How Daddy used to guffaw at its fundamentalistic preaching to the Choir.

° And the homily began promisingly enough, with a humorous anecdote. Profligate Youth cheats on final exam, Professor observes the scamping, Professor rejects the proffered finished exam, Professor promises an F, Profligate Youth draws himself to his full 6.5feet and says, "Do you know who my Daddy is?", Professor say he don't care who he be, Profligate Youth (in a Christlike brainstorm) shuffles Blue Book indistinguishably into the large stack of uncontested exams and dashes out of the lecture hall lickety split.

° Tee hee! One can see where this is going, shrewd shrewd Profligate Youth, all headed for twisty sainthood.

° But no! At this point the anecdote goes horribly horribly wrong: Profligate Youth has a recurring nightmare that God the Father is staring disappointedly at him--o Lordy, I just know that happened--so he repents, is given the penance of repeating the course, and the absolution of not being expelled. "And from that point on, Profligate Youth changed his ways and followed the Path of Righteousness."

° And from that point on--because, of course, if Profligate Youth was a weaselly little sneakthief when young, he just learnt to hide it better, most likely at Enron or in Congress or in the Council of Bishops, when older; and the reason he had those dreams, and "repented," as Cousin Gypsy could tell you, was that he subconsciously realised that he might be traced through someone's knowledge of who his prominent father was, he'd stepped right into it. But, I say, from that point on my attention wandered, for I saw there was no Aristotelian probability in this homily.

° Leopard change his spots my foot!

° Didn't set about counting the panes in the stained glass windows, I know the sum by heart.

° And I could still taste your espresso from an hour before--you recall it had two identical hearts side by side in the bottom of the cup--and I recollected one of your earthsign groundings: for the moment I told you, sei mesi fa, of the Clerick's seconding Baron Scarpione's injunction against pansyflower communicants' behaving in a way that they two construed as "out there," you retorted--well, what else was there to say?

° So I suddenly saw the problem stated simply: "What behaviour is 'out there'?" Why not use this liturgical downtime wilily by observing, Colette fashion, the mixedsex couples? For they, at least, must surely be "in there."

° Well, there were only three couples in the entire basilica canoodling during the preachment. In fact there were only three mixedsex couples under the age of thirty. And it does appear that at Assumption couples, mixedsex samesex or bothsex, over the age of thirty observe a tabu against touching one another.

° For sure none of them do. Touch.

° But, I say, three twentysomething mixedsex couples. What's more, none of the men was dressed appropriately, and only one of the women (a floral print sleeveless sheath, nicely toned to her fairly natural blonde hair), so these couples perfectly display the prerogatives of secondclass membership at Assumption.

° For sure samesex and bothsex couples could not aspire to firstclass. God's curse must lie equally upon the barren and the illtailored.

° These then are the observed customs of secondclass affection, tacitly acknowledged as "in there" by Baron and Clergy alike:

1. The taller may rest an arm on the shorter's naked shoulder.

2. The shorter may stroke the face of the taller during a lull in the dramatic flow of the sermon.

3. And the taller may place a hand on the hand of the shorter and both hands may rest in the crotch area of the taller.

I'm telling you what I saw with my own eyes. Bastien would've seen it too and attested, but couple No. 3 were in the pew directly behind his blond head. I had to stretch my spine to full length just to view them catercorner.

° In short, we now know exactly what secondclass communicant samesex and bothsex couples may, with Clerick's and Baron Scarpione's permission, do during the sermon at Assumption, I scarcely like to think of the Passing of the Peace.

° What is "out there," then, must necessarily include:

1. -- -- -- -- --

°--well, I reckon there's to be no tongue, 'sall I can figure . . . .

§§§§§

° Course the catch is there aren't any twentysomething samesex or bothsex couples at Assumption, too busy worshipping the goddess Venus, I expect.

° And pocky, pustulant, putrefying posttwenty flesh in any imaginable conjugation--eeeuuu!

° Affectionately (but in an "in there" sort of way), Giac.