Fifty Shades of Irony

There Once was an Ugly Duckling

There once was an ugly duckling, with feathers all stubby and brown.

When he was very young, something happened to his Mom and Dad. Perhaps someone had adopted them and put them in a duck pond somewhere. He only knew that he hadn’t seen them in a very long time, so he had no one to protect him. He was all on his own.

All the other ducklings, who were fuzzy and yellow and didn’t look like him at all, made fun of him and gave him a hard time.

  

They pecked at him. They quacked at him. They made fun of the fact that he didn’t have a Mom and Dad. They thought his short brown feathers looked stupid and named him Stubby. They wouldn’t let him dabble in the slime in his favourite slime-pond.

One duckling in particular didn’t like him. His name was Wakwak and he quacked at him in a very mean way. “Wakwak,” he said, “we’re better than you, wakwak.”

When the ugly duckling asked why, Wakwak just said, “Because we’re fuzzy and yellow. And you’re not.”

That didn’t make much sense to Stubby, because he knew it didn’t matter what you looked like on the outside. But the other ducks disagreed with him and picked on him all the time.

Still, he was lucky because he did have one very good friend. It was another duckling who looked even uglier than he did, all lumpy and grey like mildew. “Let’s stick together,” Tuffy said to him.

He was called Tuffy because he was so tough. When the yellow ducklings quacked at him, he honked right back at them and sometimes scared them away.

Tuffy said to his friend, “You need someone to protect you.” So Tuffy

began to scare the yellow ducklings away when they were mean. Stubby managed to avoid the darting blows of the tiny little orange bills for a while.

They had such wonderful times together in the duck pond! Stubby was so glad that he had finally found a friend.

But then one day Tuffy said:

“You know, Stubs, I’ve been asked to go swim with those guys over there.”

"You mean those yellow ducklings? After what they did to us?”

 
“Ah, they’re not so bad. They want me to protect them from those mean geese over there.”

Stubby wondered how the geese could be any meaner than the yellow ducklings.

“When will you be back?”

“Oh, maybe next year when we’re all grown up. But don’t worry, the time will fly by.”

But the time didn’t fly by, and Stubby got very discouraged and lonely

and one day decided to leave this unfriendly flock and go somewhere
where he could at last find some peace.

He walked for seventeen miles on a dirt road until he realized he could

swim a lot faster to where he wanted to go (as far away as possible!), so he found a nearby lake and swam and swam and swam and swam and swam.

He finally found a quiet cove where he could be alone and peaceful. But then he heard something. A croak. A really loud croak. It sounded like a frog. The biggest frog in the world!

Soon he found the lake was anything but peaceful: there were bullfrogs everywhere!

There were so many bullfrogs croaking that he felt like he was in a field of cows!

“I am the Bullfrog King, ribbit ribbit”, said a big fat bullfrog.

“Ah shaddap. I’m the Bullfrog Queen and I’m a lot bigger and smarter

than you.”

The two bullfrogs began to arm-wrestle each other with their slimy green arms and try to poke at each other’s bulging bullfrog eyes. Stubby was  shocked! He had never seen anything so mean in his life. This was worse than being pecked at by those little yellow beaks.

“Stop!” Stubby cried to the two wrestling frogs. Don’t you know it’s wrong to hurt another person?” he cried.

“We’re not people. We’re frogs. Who are you anyways?”

“I’m Stubby, the Ugly Duckling, with feathers all stubby and brown.”

“Well, I’m the Frog King and I’m all slimy and green. RIBBIT!” He and the girl frog went right on fighting and throwing clumps of slime at each other.

Stubby was failing in his role as a peacekeeper. It was very discouraging. Even the dragonflies were hissing at each other. Was anybody really getting along in this lake? Why was everyone so mean to each other?

 The days grew shorter and colder. Soon Stubby realized his wings were still too small for him to fly, so he couldn’t join all the grownup ducks as they migrated south to keep warm for the winter.  He could hear them quacking above him as they flew in a v-formation across the sky.

“I wonder if my Mom and Dad are in that flock,” he sighed. Then suddenly he realized something. The first few flakes of snow were beginning to fall and settle on his stubby brown feathers. He had to find some way to keep warm – and soon!   So he had some quick thinking to do. “If I can’t migrate,” he said, “maybe I can hibernate instead.”

“Hibernate” means you sleep all winter, so you have to do it in a warm

place. He began to dig a hole in the ground with his bill, but the ground was full of icky worms.

He began to look for a cave, and found a nice warm cozy one, but all of a sudden a giant grizzly bear roared at him, and he waddled quickly away going wakwakwakwakwakwakwakwakwakwakwakwaaaaaaaaaaak!

Finally he found a hollow log and nestled down in it for the winter, hoping he would be warm enough and stay asleep so he wouldn’t be hungry.

But it wasn’t very warm in the hollow log. In fact it wasn’t warm at all.

Soon he began to shiver. How could he ever get through the winter in a freezing cold place like this?

But then: he heard something.

A familiar sort of honking noise.

He couldn’t believe it! It was Tuffy!

“Tuffy! What are YOU doing here?”

“Those other ducklings weren’t so friendly. You were right. They just wanted to make fun of me ‘cause I’m grey and lumpy. Hey, you’re taking my log.”

“No, Tuffy. Nobody’s going to bully me this time. I’m staying. Besides, we can snuggle up together and keep each other warm.”

“Aw, all right, move over. And don’t take the best spot.”

As the weather grew colder and colder, the two ducklings spent more and more time sleeping. Soon they were in a deep sleep and were so still, they looked like two statues.

But then the first rays of spring began to penetrate the holes in the top of the hollow log. Stubby blinked his shiny little eyes and nudged Tuffy with his wing.

 “Get up, it’s spring,” he said.

“Oh man, I feel like I slept for three months!”

“You did.”

But then Tuffy noticed something, and Stubby noticed something. Over the winter, they had changed. They had grown up, and now they looked completely different.

Stubby looked magnificent, with a shiny green head, a copper-colored

chest, soft silver feathers on his tummy, and a white ring around his
neck.   He had grown into a beautiful mallard drake. He tried out his
quack a few times and was very happy with it.

  

But Tuffy. . . well, he wasn’t so lucky. He looked sort of weird: stringy grey feathers were poking through the moldy-looking grey fuzz on his back. His neck was very long and bent. His beak looked funny too, very long, and bluish-black.

“Tuff, I don’t know how to tell you this, but. . .”

Tuffy ran to the lake and jumped in. He bent his long neck and looked at his reflection.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay,” he said. “What a mess!”

“Oh, it’s not so bad, Tuff. Maybe you’re becoming a stork or something.”

“This is the limit. Sorry friend, I’m running away before the duck police catch up with me.”

Tuffy waddled away very quickly, hiding his head under his wing, and

Stubby realized he was alone again.

In fact, he had never been this lonely before or felt so sad. He realized
that being handsome didn’t mean his problems were over.

  

But just when he thought he’d be alone for the rest of his life, he heard something from far away.

A sort of wakwak sound.

He looked over towards the far side of the lake and saw a whole flock of ducks  swimming toward him. He remembered how mean those ducklings had been and wondered whether he should try to stand up to them, or just run away.

But then he noticed something: these ducks looked just like him! They

had shiny green heads and rings around their necks and nice fat squatty bodies. They wack-wacked in a friendly manner.

Taking a deep breath, he jumped into the lake.

Just then a very pretty girl duck with ruffly golden-brown feathers swam up to him. “Hey! Aren’t you that duck they used to call Stubby?”

“Oh. Um. No. Well, yes. But that was a long time ago.”

“I used to see those other ducklings giving you a hard time, but my Mom didn’t want me to swim away from our flock to defend you.”

“That’s OK, my friend Tuffy defended me. That is, until he ran away.”

“You know, Stubby, you’re a legend among the ducks. Everyone admires the way you refused to be nasty to those mean ducklings. They bullied you, but you wouldn’t bully them back.”

If a duck could blush, Stubby would have blushed at that moment.

“By the way,” he asked, “whatever happened to all those fuzzy yellow ducklings?”

“Look over there.”

He saw a flock of very ordinary-looking ducks dabbling around in the water. Really, they weren’t any better-looking than he had been, with his feathers all stubby and brown. He thought he saw Wakwak in the flock, but when he tried to catch his eye, he swam away.

“They were much cuter as fuzzy yellow ducklings.”  

“Too bad they didn’t stay that way,” his new friend said.

“But it doesn’t matter what you look like,” Stubby said.

The girl ducked looked at him. “No, you’re right. That’s not important.”

Stubby didn’t know how to act around girl ducks. He told himself that

she was a girl, and she was his friend, but she wasn’t his “girl friend”.
But he liked her so much that one day he decided that maybe she was, after all.

Ducks get married just like people do, and they stay together for always.

So the two ducks decided to spend the rest of their lives together, have a family of their own and be happy.

 And that might be the end of the story, except. . . wait a minute, what happened to Tuffy?

 What happened to that weird-looking duckling with all the ugly grey feathers and the geeky long neck? 

Well, one day he saw a flock of swans gliding around in the water. Swans!

Everyone knew they didn’t like outsiders. They were proud and thought they owned the lake.                  

In a panic Tuffy looked around for a place to hide. But by then he was

too big to hide in the marsh grass, and they saw him.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay,” he said. “The jig is up.”

 But then something truly amazing happened. One of them waved his giant white wing and said, “C’mon, brother, we need a big swan to swim at the end of the line.”

“Why are you asking me? I’m all grey and lumpy.  I’d ruin your colour scheme.”

The swan laughed (honk, honk, honk!). “Haven’t you looked in the mirror lately?”

Tuffy bent his head – it was easy to do, since he had such a long curvy neck – and saw that he had grown up to be a beautiful swan!

Now he saw why swans were so proud! He bent his bill to kiss his

reflection in the water. “I’m gorgeous!” he said.

He was very pleased with himself. But he was still a bit confused.

“How come somebody has to swim at the back of the flock?”

“We need a wingman. Swans get hunted, so we have to watch out all the time.  And people are always trying to capture us and put us

in parks and stuff. ”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“It isn’t. But we’re gorgeous, so we try to make the best of it.”

So Tuffy, whose new name was Sebastian Swan, swam over to the flock and took up his position in the rear. He was never captured and put in a park, but he found out that the life of a swan can be harder than he thought. Being beautiful doesn’t guarantee an easy life.

  

Meanwhile, Stubby (whose name was now Montgomery Mallard, Monty for short) settled down with Melinda Mallard, and they had a very large family of ducklings whose feathers were all stubby and brown. Once in a while he saw Tuffy (Sebastian Swan) gliding around in the lake with his family of cygnets (baby swans), who were lumpy and grey like Tuffy used to be.

But Monty Mallard told all his duckling children never to make fun of the cygnets. “They can’t help it if they’re swans,” he said. “Not everybody gets to be beautiful brown ducklings, like you.”

 




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Fifty Shades of Religious Doubt

I sorta-kinda-do remember this song. Didn't know who sang it, and was surprised just now to find out it was Andy Kim, a Lebanese-Canadian (didn't know THAT either) who penned such immortal tunes as Rock Me Gently, Sugar Sugar, and Baby How'd We Ever Get This Way.

He must have been in a mood that day back in '71 or whenever-it-was, because he managed to write something of substance, something that captures the angst that affects millions of people to this day: how do we know there is a God? How do we know "he" loves us, cares for us, counts all the hairs on our heads, etc.? Must we take it on "faith", and isn't that circular logic: in order to believe in God, you must believe (in God)?

The thing that's weird is that for many years I was a "believer", someone who came back to the church after decades of cynicism and even bitterness. Some of my previous posts have dealt with Rev. Russell Horsburgh, the renegade United Church minister convicted of sexual immorality and jailed in the mid-'60s. He just happened to be the minister of my church. My family fled to the Baptists, where more abuse occurred in the form of excruciating fundamentalism in which you were expected to check your brain at the door.

So why did I come back to organized religion at all? It was the particular circumstances of that time, around 1991, which I thought was the lowest point of my life. It wasn't. That came later, in 2005, which was just about the time I began to pull away from the church. Conversion in reverse, I guess. Reversion?

I want there to be a God that loves us tenderly, etc. etc., but I don't feel it any more. I just can't keep it up. It seems too far-fetched in this wretched, dangerous world. I find it hard to believe that when we depart this realm we are borne up on a sort of Otis elevator of pure light to sit on a cloud of virtue for all eternity (but only if we're "good" - a sort of Santa Claus deal, where God "sees you when you're sleeping, and knows when you're awake").

But maybe, like birds, trees, earthworms, plankton, we just die. If we are part of nature, how can it be otherwise?

This song would probably not go down well today in the Southern U. S., where "doubting" or wondering "if" there is a God is considered blasphemy. (Besides, the guy's from Lebanon.) Not only is there a God, He is represented by a big fat sweating pig in white polyester swindling the widow out of her precious mite so he can buy himself another Cadillac. A holy boondoggle, obviously, but people who lack the capacity to think critically, people of no means or living on the edge of desperation, will cling to whoever or whatever promises them deliverance from despair.

Much of this "product" (for that is what this manufactured grace really is) concerns itself with money. People are told that if they pray hard, they will receive "a gift" that comes straight from God. So they pray their faces off, put money they can't spare on the collection plate, then - wonder of wonders -one day they receive in the mail, in an unmarked envelope, a $10 bill. Hallellujah! So the $20 they parted with at the evangelical service paid off, after all. They may wait months for another one of God's "free gifts", and eventually they will taper off altogether as they're pressured to keep giving more and more. A sort of Ponzi scheme for God.

Then there are the liberal Christians, and these are the people I fear the most. Oh, they're nice all right, but deep down they're afraid of anyone who is Different. They are instructed to practice compassion, but it's in the sense of charity, which is always tinged with pity. Though they will never admit it and would be offended if you even suggested it, they secretly congratulate themselves on their spiritual generosity and their "tolerance".

But what IS tolerance anyway? What does it mean if I "tolerate" you? It seems to me it means that I can barely stand you, but I'll grit my teeth and stay in your presence, if only to demonstrate to everyone how tolerant I am.

I can't imagine Andy Kim, Mr. Sugar Sugar, known for inventing the genre of bubblegum pop and writing hit numbers for The Archies, sitting down and composing such a moody, even tortured song. It's unusual. We heard it a lot in Canada back in 1971, but the YouTube scuttlebutt is that it didn't get much play in the States. It passed through me then and got stored at the back of the mental closet without my knowledge, and I had no idea who was responsible for it, as it had a sort of Neil Diamondesque sentiment, an angst-filled cry in the wilderness, an I Am I Said shouted into the arid howling wasteland of conventional belief.

Is there, is there balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole. . . to heal the sin-sick soul? Or did we will it, wish it, pray it, think it, beg it into being?

                                

Is there a God? I really don't know,
Does he have a son? I really don't know.
But when I'm down and things are all wrong.
I turn to him to help me be strong.
And so I pray Lord..shine on, shine on, shine on, shine on your light. 

God made the sun.
At least that's what they say.
The waters and trees.
He made night and day.
But who made the child who's hungry and blind?
And who has the answers that I cannot find?
And so I pray Lord..shine on, shine on, shine on, shine on your light.
And let me see.
Please let me see. 

People everywhere living in despair, no one really cares if they're dying.
Politicians swear that they really care, everybody knows that they're lying.
People cannot find any peace of mind, even though they have the almighty dollar. 
So they live and search, never find a Church, everyone is fine 'til the final hour. 

Is there a God?
Is there a God?
I really don't know.
Who has the answers?
Is there a God?
Does he have a son?
I really don't know.
Who has the answers?

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Fifty Shades of Snails

Oh once I had a downy swan, she was so very frail

She sat upon an oyster shell and hatched me out a snail
The snail it changed into a bird, the bird to butterfly
And he who tells a bigger tale would have to tell a lie.
Sing tarry-o day, sing, autumn to May

Peter, Paul and Mary

Dear Mr. Green Jeans:

Why is my yard suddenly full of snails? I've found huge piles of them in the mornings, like a giant snail orgy, and they're all over the yards. I picked up over 200 just this morning and that's the littlest pile I've found yet!
We've also got tons of worm beds and little mushrooms popping up all over the yard and the field next to us. We've been in a drought for a while and have just had a lot of rain recently, and I know their eggs can stay for a long time, but these are tons of snails. They're not just one kind, it's the small white ones, the spiral brown ones, and even the big round ones and they're every size from baby to huge. They're not just in a garden and I can't put eggshells or copper all over my yards. These things are making slimy trails everywhere and are hanging all over the outside of my house.

- Slimed

SNAILS SNAILS SNAILS. I can’t get them out of my head. Also that song about an English Country Garden, which is equally offensive.

I don’t know how this all connects together, although I suppose it does in the usual bass-ackwards way. I have set myself a goal for two of my grandchildren’s birthdays: since they’re fairly close together, the two will be combined into one celebration, bound to be a biggie.

Since we’re on a limited income and since they are already buried in toys they don’t particularly want, I would like to try something different. I want to make all their presents. I have become obsessed with knitting stuffed toys, and so far have had some pretty good results, along with some disasters that I gutted for their stuffing and threw away. My goal is not to buy anything for the two girls (who will be turning 5 and 7), except materials to make my knitted stuffies.

But I had to have a theme. For reasons I can’t trace back, I wanted to make a storybook (another thing I like to do for them) complete with pictures gleaned off the generous internet: a retelling of the Ugly Duckling story, in which the duckling grows up to be a beautiful. . . duck. But I decided that pictures weren’t enough: I was going to attempt to illustrate the story with stuffies. (I'm getting to the snails, I promise.)

Making the ducklings was fairly easy, using an Easter chick pattern and adapting it: Stubby, the ugly one; Wakwak, the most obnoxious of the “normal” yellow ducklings; and Tuffy, the baby swan. I did make a mature swan, but a pink one (cuzzadafact that Lauren specifically asked for one). Like many patterns I find, it had to be completely revised to make it more swanny. (How I love ya, how I love ya. Sorry.)

I expanded the story a bit to include a Frog King and Frog Queen, one of my more challenging patterns. (Accessories are key. The Queen is wearing a pink bead anklet.) This project is coming along well, though it’s no secret I’m obsessed, and also constantly running out to buy materials (I NEVER have the right color/quantity of yarn for what I want to do). But there’s no snail in this story, and Erica loves snails, collects them, puts them in jars, watches them, feeds them leaves, etc. She is a girl who loves creepy-crawlies.

My knitted snail pattern was, oh. It was dreadful. It looked so good, and the pattern-book said even a beginner could do it. I have been knitting for fifty years, and I am here to tell you that NO beginner could even begin this, let alone finish it. The shell went OK, but the instructions for the body were impossible to interpret. (This was from a book of knitted amigurumi, which I do not recommend.) So it was redesigning time. I came up with a sort of beanbag slug for a body, then attached the shell, hoping it would do.

You couldn’t possibly reproduce a real snail, disgusting and slimy with its indecent eye-stalks probing ickily forwards, in any sort of textile form.  But I did the best I could. So what does any of this have to do with Donovan, or the videos I posted today?

I don’t know why his songs came into my head today. I adored him as a kid: I got stoned to Donovan for the first time in my life, and I remember hearing Wear Your Love Like Heaven feeling as if I was three feet off the ground. (Never mind that it was also used in a Yardley’s Sigh Shadow makeup ad.)

Looking back, he was a phenomenal artist: Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow (CONFESS: did this song inspire you to smoke banana peels?), Atlantis, Jennifer Juniper, and tons of others. His double album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden (a sappy title only the ‘60s could get away with) was chock-a-block with charming, imaginative, tender anthems to those free-and-easy times: record #1 had his more “hip”songs with arrangements and backup musicians, and the other one his wistful, guitar-only folk tunes, all self-composed.  Song of the Naturalist’s Wife began with the sound of a newborn baby crying, tugging at the viscera of every female who ever listened.

Right. Listening to these for the first time in (blllblblbltt) years gave me the strangest feeling. Some of them seemed a bit sappy, but others got me right in that twingy little place behind the breast-bone.  I had to pick one: and into my head popped his silliest, flutiest, cutest, hippest number. And there it was: Lock upon my garden gate’s a snail, that’s what it is! So it was one of those weird things.

Donovan was barely 20 years old when he became “Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan” (which, in spite of a superficial physical resemblance, he wasn’t:  his lyrics were wispy and fey, lacking all that rage and snap and snarl). He had polio as a child (who knew?), so he walked with a limp. His son, also named Donovan, once popped up on Sex and the City. I don’t feel like finding out any more because this is already meandering on far too long.

(And nutmeg. Yes, I smoked nutmeg and it was awful and later on I found out it could cause brain damage.) Snails can be cute, but for the most part they’re kind of awful. Unlike slugs, they have the decency to withdraw into shells that can be quite pretty. But the slime trails they leave can’t be defended. Peter, Paul and Mary did one of those icky-sixties songs, whimsical, that incorporated a snail. Then there is the Dear Abby of snailhood that I found about a horrible snail invasion in somebody’s yard.

Quick! Ick! Get the snail bait!

And a not-very-fond farewell to the topic of snails. Two poems I remember so well from WTF ("where the fxxx?"), the precious-sounding original, then the parody.

My Garden by T. E. Brown

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Rose plot,

Fringed pool,

Fern'd grot --

The veriest school

Of peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not --

Not God! in Gardens! when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign;

'Tis very sure God walks in mine.

My Garden by J. A. Lindon

A garden is a lovesome thing? What rot!
Weed plot,
Scum pool,
Old pot,
Snail-shiny stool
In pieces; yet the fool
Contends that snails are not -
Not snails!  in gardens!  when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I see their trails!
’Tis very sure my garden’s full of snails!

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