ceramic ashtray

I figure schoolchildren don't typically bring home ceramic ashtrays as father's day gifts anymore. I think, as art projects go, the anti-smoking movement had rendered them extinct even way back when I was a little child. Maybe they still exist, but they're called candy dishes now. Or paper clip holders (anti-sugar movement).

I'd say macaroni art still roams free, but I assume that celiacs have ruined that for everyone, as well.  Silly celiacs.  So afraid of wheat.

However, I am confident that the artistic offerings young children generate at school for their parents still exist in some form or another*.

I'm sure that the first of these childish scrawls are met by their parents with delight. And probably the second and third and so on. And I have no doubt that some of these are tucked away lovingly as cherished souvenirs** of the days when your children were nothing but potential and still loved you. But there must be a point when you shudder when your son or daughter hands over another one of these tokens. Thinking "good god, not more". Wondering how to subtly dispose of it rather than try to find somewhere to put it. Knowing that your child will likely be very upset if you accidentally drop it in a puddle, set it on fire, or are cornered into saying (lying) "your painting is in the recycling bin? Sorry kiddo. I can't imagine how it got there."

My question is, at what point is it no longer insensitive for you to say something like, "that's great... very impressive. how about tomorrow you make a present for... um... someone else?"

Jack and Molly are a long way off from that sort of thing. First things first. (Crawl, first. Abstract expressionism, later.)

I'm getting somewhere with this.

I obviously am not the parent of a kindergarten-aged minion. I have a cat***. And I assure you it's not just human young who bequest unsolicited gifts on their caregivers.

There was a day last winter when Orange woke me from a blissful slumber and would not relax until I followed him downstairs into the hallway. Where he sat down, looked up at me, and started purring maniacally - remnants of a mouse at his side. The rear remnants. The head and front legs were missing. I have a vivid imagination for sound. Whenever I think of it, I still hear (in my mind) the sound of my sweet and docile furry friend crunching through mouse spine and skull. Hearing it right now. Ahem. Moving on...

I know that it's not unusual for pets to bring their kills back and presenting them to their people. I have experienced this before. I lived in a house in Banff with a minor mouse problem****. The Orange One proved himself an adept and ferocious hunter. More than once I leaned down to pick up what I thought to be some lint from the floor by my bed to discover that it had bones. Ick.

Last Tuesday around midnight, I decided to call it a night after spending a relaxing evening lounging in bed, watching episodes of Weeds on my laptop. I wandered downstairs to have a bedtime cigarette on my kitchen porch. Orange, ever the faithful companion, followed me downstairs, and promptly disappeared and started rustling around under a shelf on the floor by my stove, where I keep seldom-used kitchen appliances. I went outside, thinking "what a strange cat." When I came back in a few minutes later, he darted out from under the shelf and sprinted into the livingroom, leaving me to think, again, "what a strange cat."

It took a second to register that I'd seen what looked very much like a tail trailing from one corner of his mouth. I chased him down and found him crouched on the floor, with, indeed, the tail of a mouse dangling from his lips. I stuck a finger in his jaw (on the other side) to try and make him let go. He would have none of it. I danced nervously back into the kitchen (thinking "oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god"), fully expecting to hear the snapping and crunching of skeleton any second. But silence. I gathered some courage, and went back into the livingroom for a second go. I found The Orange One batting it around happily. "Aha," thought I, tossing a different toy across the room to distract him. It worked. He raced after it. Sadly, I hadn't had the foresight to bring anything with me to transport the body, and palming the warm corpse of a recently deceased rodent was not appetizing. I retreated to the kitchen to regroup, emerging seconds later with a dustpan.

I managed to distract the cat again and slid the dustpan under the mouse, like a spatula under a pancake. The cat, astutely, realized that I was messing with his new favourite toy, and pounced back towards me. With less than a second to react, my only course of action was to flip the pancake. The mouse somersaulted in the air several times, landing safely back on my waiting dustpan (skilled short-order cook). Now safely out of reach of my watchful feline.

It didn't appear to have been punctured. It's musculoskeletal system seemed intact. I poked at it a couple of times, to see if maybe it was just in shock, and I should put food and water dishes, together with an old sock (for a soft warm bed) in a shoebox and barricade it in the bathroom until it recovered. No such luck. Dead as dirt*****. I put the dustpan outside to deal with later. The cat spent the entire night sitting dejectedly on the livingroom floor on top of the last spot the mouse had made contact, occasionally mewing plaintively.

I found my cat in a state of eager agitation when I got home from work tonight. Not immediately thinking "dead rodent", I tried giving him some treats and some loving attention. Neither helped. He wrapped himself around my ankles. Looked up at me, purring insistently. Went into the hallway, sat down. Came back when I didn't follow him. And so on.

I gave in and followed him, of course. I didn't catch anything ususual or of import in the hallway. My gaze drifted forward to my livingroom****** floor, where I saw a splatter-art masterpiece rendered in blood. My gaze drifted down towards my feet, and I saw that what I had taken for a dead leaf carried in on my shoe was actually a mouse, drained of all bodily fluid. Gentle Orange One sitting beside it, looking up at me proudly.

Enough is enough.  It's not that I don't appreciate the gesture - no wait, it's exactly that I don't appreciate the gesture. Please, no more.

I'll of course have to take action against possible mouse problem, if only to avoid any more corpses - the next one might be on my pillow.



*Actually, I know this to be true. Though as far as I can tell, in our efforts to dummy-proof the development of our children, as well as to ensure that none of them are left feeling like anyone might be better than anyone else at anything, artistic expression is now limited to putting stickers of characters from television shows or movies on construction paper. Perhaps interspersed with some ink stamps of characters from television shows or movies. With maybe a smear of glitter-infused glue-stick, for the adventurous. What's so wrong with handing a kid a piece of paper and a crayon and saying, "Go"*******?

**however, given the quality of the artwork of the modern child, how long can a page covered in Dora the Explorer stickers keep you impressed? Years later, will you look at the stickers coming loose from the yellowed page and think fondly of days gone by? Or will you lament that you don't have any mementos of their actual work, which could prompt memories of their developing personalities? Just a thought.

***The Orange One. "Orange", for short. Sometimes pronounced in French, for reasons that are not clear, even to me.

****wildlife everywhere, it being in a national park + poorly maintained dwellings intended to house a transient population = mice

*****which is not dead at all, but teeming with micro-organisms.

******also known as "kill room"

*******I am aware that, especially with the very young, the point of these projects is not to create "art" in a strict sense but to assist in the development of hand-eye co-ordination, so maybe I'm being a bit harsh on the stickers. But previously mentioned crayon and blank page would also lend to the development of hand-eye co-ordination. And maybe, also, the development of independent and creative thinking********.

********On a sort of related note, I've been told that the Ministry of Education is considering dispensing with penmanship as part of the grade school curriculum, on the assumption that everything in the future will be digitized and cursive writing won't be useful in a world where all written communication takes place by bbm. Will they just stop as soon as you learn to print your own name? Will future generations sign their marriage certificates with a finger paint thumb print and their names scribbled in crayon?

Will passports be password protected, and after they scan your barcode at customs they ask you to verify/authenticate your identity by entering your password (the one you've lazily kept since grade 5), and then, just to be sure, re-entering it, all the while asking you the standard questions?

Citizenship?

bieber4Ever


Anything to declare?

bieber4Ever