The Life

The Girl and I saw someone die today.

We were driving to a gathering of naturalists -- bird-watchers and amateur scientists – who were taking their children to see the fens near the shores of the Irish Sea. The Girl and I talk about the natural world every day, but she longs to talk about these subjects with kids her own age, and here I hoped I found kids who would share our interests.

On the way, though, we came upon a man lying unconscious by the side of the road, with a few people gathered around. I pulled over and let them know that I had Red Cross training, and was relieved to find that one of the people already working on him was a nurse preparing to give him CPR. The bad news was that the victim, a bicyclist apparently hit by a car, had a serious head injury and I didn’t feel a pulse.

I told The Girl to wait in the car about ten metres away, and in-between checking on her we did whatever we could, but when the ambulance finally arrived – it seemed like an hour later, and was probably ten minutes -- he still had no pulse.

I noted, in a moment of small gratitude, that he was an elderly man, at the end of a long life. I noted his church hymnal and apparent name, and pointed it out to the priest who arrived from the village. I saw the driver who accidentally killed him, distraught on the margins. The nurse in her Sunday finery knelt in the grass and attended to her ritual, a number of us struggling to help – and at the epicentre of this attention, a head wound and grey flesh that told us our efforts were pure ceremony.

As there was little we could do with the man we made ourselves useful however we could, directing traffic or holding cardboard to hide the body from motorists. Gardai (police) arrived one by one until the area was a crime scene, and long after there was nothing else for me to do, we still waited at the scene, as our tiny car was boxed in by emergency vehicles.

I returned to The Girl, waiting in the car. Thank you for being so patient, I said.

“Is he dead, Daddy?” she said. I nodded, and held her for a while.

When we finally got on our way, we talked about how it made her feel.

“I didn’t feel scared,” The Girl said. “I feel sorry for the man who died, but I don’t feel that much.”

You don’t ever need to apologise for how you feel, I said, only for what you do. You did the right thing, waiting patiently, and that’s what counts. You feel whatever you feel, and it’s never right or wrong.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

No, I said, but I saw what looked like his name in his hymnal - he seemed to have been riding his bicycle home from church. 

Whatever his name, we should pray and remember him. I’ll try to picture him, not as he looked lying there, but as he must have been in life.

That body was a man once, I said – he must have giggled as a baby, and run through fields as a child, and endured adolescence. Maybe he had a first kiss, maybe he got married, maybe he had lots of friends, or still does. So let’s you and I remember his life once in a while, because that’s what we’d want people to do for us.

“God, why did you have to give us such a strange day?” she asked rhetorically.

We’re alive and healthy, and it’s a lovely warm day, and we’re going to the seaside, I said. For us, it’s the best day in a long time, and all the better if we could at least try to help someone, even if we failed. We don’t need to feel sorry for ourselves.

As late as we were, the day turned out amazing; The Girl and I met children with the same passions and knowledge, and they talked eagerly about the prehistoric animals they both love -- the Jefferson sloth and the Opabina, and all the supersized animals of the world gone by. They went to the seaside and fished their nets in the surf, holding intense debates about whatever they found. The parents and I relaxed on the beach and exchanged numbers to get our kids together more often.

We explored the fens and hid inside a bird-watching hide together, looking first at the birds and talking about their feeding habits and mating rituals. Then, cheekily, she saw people walking along the beach through her binoculars, and began describing them in the same way as the birds.

“Daddy, I see a Pink-Suited Lady walking along the beach, and a Bald Glasses Man is giving her directions – I think they’re flirting!”

We drove home giddy and exhausted, listening to Vince Guaraldi and discussing how no one could ever feel too terrible listening to his music. We passed through the Dublin Mountains, their flanks covered in the blinding yellow of gorse and their tops of bald stone. We passed fields of rapeseed just coming into their own golden blooms, and sprays of toadflax erupting from castle walls.

Clouds in the distance looked like they had been touched in watercolour, and then smudged across the sky. Then the sun broke through in several places at once, sending shafts of light down to the green fields below and illuminating sheep in the distance.

The Girl putting her bare and sandy feet up on the seat cushions, saying, “Daddy, I think we are living the Life.”

Yes we are, I said.

Looking for eggs

Treasure

"Even now, in the middle of Dublin, there are horses and carriages, and while they do make manure on the road many of the local gardeners go out at night and grab it. It is not uncommon to see one bicycling home with their treasures -- two giant bags of horse manure balanced, one on each handlebar."

-- From the RTE documentary "Man You're Green," broadcast July 5 2010.

A Patch of Somewhere Else

When people list history’s most world-changing inventions, they usually include fire, or guns, or computers. Rarely do people mention something so ubiquitous to us that it has become, literally, invisible – glass and transparent plastic. Glass was known to the ancients but rare -- Job 28:17 lists it with gold among the most precious of materials. In the Renaissance, though, when glass began to be sheeted and shaped in quantity and with skill, it created a boom in civilisation; microscopes and telescopes opened up the breadth of the world to science, spectacles doubled men’s intellectual lifetime, and windows allowed for the creation of the first greenhouses.

We spend so much technology and energy -- electricity, oil and coal -- to heat homes against the weather, altering it to suit our needs. Properly-placed windows, however, allow the sun to do our work for us, allowing light in and slowing the passage of heat out. Even when the temperature outside dips below freezing they keep out frost, and allow the gardener to more easily control water, pests and wind-blown seeds.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more important than in a land like this, a nearly subarctic island kept mild by the Atlantic current, where the climate usually hovers just below the ideal range for many vegetables. Here, greenhouses extend the growing season by months and create pockets of Italy or Illinois in, say, the cold bogs of County Kildare.

Here and in Britain, greenhouses, cloches and coldframes allowed Victorian master gardeners to grow a range of seemingly impossible crops: not just tomatoes and aubergines but melons, lemons, limes, grapes, olives and peaches. Pineapples, for example, became a status symbol among the manor-born, and banquets sported them as a centrepiece.

Greenhouses remain a worthwhile, albeit expensive, investment for most people in most climates. If you want to start small, though, you can create cloches, transparent coverings for one or a few plants each. Victorians, again, mass-produced glass bells to cover plants to create a microclimate inside. You can do the same thing, however, with soda bottles.

To make a cloche, cut the bottom off an old two-litre bottle and place it around a seedling in the garden. Once the bottom is off, the plastic becomes very flimsy, so you might want to bury the edges several centimetres deep to keep it stable. Alternately, you can place a ring or solid structure inside if you have one, something that will keep the bottle in place but allow the seedling to grow. Or you can place it around a flowerpot whose diameter is smaller than that of the bottle.

Cloches, like greenhouses, allow you to regulate the amount of water a plant receives – here that means not getting waterlogged in the rainy winter. You might want to keep the caps of your soda bottles in a drawer, so you can put them back on at night if it gets too cold.

A step up from a cloche is a row cover, something to put over an entire bed. We clamped flexible plastic piping over our raised beds to make hoops, draped clear plastic over them and secured the plastic to the wood below the hoops with staples. Alternately, instead of plastic, you could put horticultural fleece over another raised bed, to keep in the warmth – we did both this year, and gave our plants such protection that our corn salad survived the month of snow and ice.

If you want to go sturdier still, you can build a coldframe, especially if you have old windows you can use. A coldframe is just a box with glass or transparent plastic on top, ideally with a top slanted toward the south. Fill the box with earth and plant seeds inside, and over the slanted top secure a sheet of glass or whatever you have. You could install the window frame with hinges at the top for maximum convenience, but just taking off the glass gently will do.

If spring and autumn nights get very cold where you live, you could insulate the back and sides with anything from straw bales to foam. People around here used to combine coldframes with manure composters; since manure gives off considerable heat as it matures into soil, they filled a coldframe partway with horse manure, put soil on top for the seedlings, and gave the baby plants warmth from above and below.

Polytunnels are an excellent means of creating a walk-in garden for a fraction of the cost of an old-style greenhouse. You can get one as small as a closet or as large as a warehouse, and most are guaranteed for a decade or two. We had to tear down our old one to build our house, but it had lasted almost 20 years, and we installed the new one two weeks ago.

If you have old windows, or sheets of glass or clear plastic, you could try building a greenhouse out of cob. To do this you would stack rocks to make a low wall – say, half a metre to a metre high, depending on how high the snow or moisture get – and then build upward with a well-mixed and kneaded blend of sand, clay and straw. The walls could be built upward with large holes on the south side, and the cob could be plastered around the glass to keep them in place. Such a project would consume a lot more time and labour – we have day jobs, and didn’t take this route – and it would not in as much light as an all-clear home. It has the advantage, however, of being potentially free and using all-local materials.

Since you put such care into creating a greenhouse of some kind, make sure you have good fertilised earth in it – many warm-weather plants, like tomatoes, also need a great deal of nutrition, and gardeners used to sprinkle potash and other supplements around them.

In years to come we might not be traveling as much as we used to, but with the help of a little store-bought or scavenged material, you can create, in your own land, a patch of somewhere else.

Plot Holes

The Girl showed me where she bumped her foot. "It hurt all up and down the back of my leg for a minute," she said.

That's what's called the Achilles Heel, I said, and told her the story to distract her. Achilles was the greatest hero of the Trojan war, I explained, because he could never die -- arrows just bounced off him. When he was a baby, his mother dipped him in the Styx, a magic river --

"A magic river?" she said sceptically.

Just go with it, I said. And anyone who went in the river couldn't be hurt, so she dipped him in when he was a baby. But she had to hold the baby upside down to dip him in, so there was one part of him that was left vulnerable.... his heel.

And one day, I said, when Achilles had grown into a man and become the greatest of the Trojan warriors, his enemy shot an arrow into his one weak spot -- his heel -- and killed him.

"Why didn't she just dip his heel in too?"

Well, she was holding him by the heel ...

"Why didn't she dip her hand in?"

Well, perhaps she would have fallen in if she had reached any further ...

"But then she would have been a superhero too," The Girl said.

Yes, well ...

"And why didn't they just bring all their friends to the river? And why would he die from an arrow in the heel?"

Um ... it was a poison arrow, I said.

"And why ..." The Girl wasn't buying any of this.

Does your heel still hurt? I asked.

"No," she said.

Good, I said. Let's just leave it there for now, and I'm glad you can ask so many questions. With some of these oldest stories, though, the point is not to believe the story really happened, but to learn the lesson in it.

"Dip your hand in all the way," The Girl said.

Um ... yes, we'll go with that.

Dublin birds

Eavesdropping on bees

Tonight’s lesson was recursion; I had explained it a few days ago, and was testing her memory now.

“It’s like a picture inside a picture,” The Girl said. “Or a play inside a play.”

Absolutely right, I said. What would it be in language?

“If you say something like this, and inside this is something else like this, and so on,” she said.

Right, I said. Instead of just saying ‘The child got sick’ and ‘The child gave me a gift,’ you can say ‘The child that got sick gave me a gift.’ It’s one of the things that make human language different from other animals’.

“How do we know?” The Girl said.

Great question, I said – as far as we know, because we haven’t seen other animals do it, and because it lets us make technology, and no other animals do that.

“Do we know any other animal languages?” she asked.

The only one we speak fluently is bee, I said. We know exactly what they are saying to each other – you remember how?

"They do a bum-wiggle dance!” she said, imitating it.

That’s right, I said – they don’t have voices, but they have sign language.

“I can’t wait to get bees,” she said. “Then we can peek in and see what they’re saying about us behind our back!” 

Tales from an island

"Scattery was an island mile long by half a mile wide, and now largely abandoned, and in 1930s we 167 people who lived there were almost entirely self-sufficient. We brought in our own turf, we fished and in the winter we knitted and worked inside and listened to the radio.

Many people had left the island to travel the five continents and returned to teach the children .. our children were very intelligent, and the people were comfortable by country standards.

...on an island that small, there were four churches and a monastery. Most of the gravestones dating back hundreds of years have the same names as the people there now. When people walked to the graveyard they always took the long way around, so that you could take as long as possible. The wake the night before would take all night, starting with a single unmarked grave -- you started at that stone and walked to the low tide mark barefooted, and circled around to the stone again, and you did this ten times.

This island was the home of St. Senan, born in Kilaimer in 488, and his sister is also a saint- Saint Imy. His feast day is the 8 of March, the same as John of God. Once this church was the seat of the diocese, one that covered part of several counties.

After Senan there would have been a bishop on the island for about six centuries, until the 1000s, and for many hundreds of years no women were allowed on the island -- only once was one washed ashore, and she died soon after. When Elisabethan soldiers came there, though, they took the monks and murdered them all, drowned them at sea. The families that lived here in my childhood only lived here about four hundred years."

-- Memories of a woman who grew up on Inis Catheigh, or Scattery Island, in the RTE documentary "Scattery of Senan," from 1978. The island has been abandoned, the last of the families gone, for 44 years.

My tweenager

“I still have a bit of red on my face,” The Girl said.

Yes, it doesn't look like anything serious, I said -- perhaps you brushed against something in the forest.

“Could it be that thing teenagers get?” she asked.

Acne? I said.

“That’s it. I hope it’s acne,” she said.

Why?

“Because then it will mean I’m getting older,” she said.

Honey, a year from now you’ll be a year older, whether you have acne or not, I said. You’re as old as you are – and I’m in no hurry for you to get older.

“Why not?”

I want you to enjoy this age while you can, I said, because once it’s over, you’ll never get it back. Being a teenager looks good in the distance to you now, and it will look good in the distance behind you once you’re past it, but most people find it terrible at the time.

“How can it be that terrible if it looks that good to everyone?” she asked.

Because most things look better when you don’t have them, I said. Everything's beautiful in the distance.

Thou art my Girl

On a few occasions I have hustled The Girl to bed before watching the BBC’s Hollow Crown series, explaining to The Girl that this was by Shakespeare – the best writer ever, but way too grown up for her to see.

“Could I just see a little bit?” she asked. No, I said – you have to be a very big kid to be big enough for Shakespeare.

Every so often, she smells the forbidden fruit again and brings up Shakespeare, insisting that she is old enough now.

Well, that worked, I thought – and in fairness, she is developing more mature tastes. Maybe, I thought, she’s ready.

“What is Shakespeare’s bloodiest play?” she asked.

Probably something called Titus Andronicus, I said.

“What’s it about?” she asked. It was a sad story, I said, set in ancient Rome. The Girl has been reading quite a bit about Rome, and was particularly taken with the stories of Cleopatra and Boudica, the women who defied legions of men.

“Can I see it?” she asked. Under no circumstances, I told her gently – it is far too adult for most adults’ taste, and I seem to recall a certain eight-year-old making me turn off Bambi halfway through.

In this The Girl is different than many modern children; I see people bring pre-schoolers to the latest summer blockbusters, with all their bloodshed, but we allow her a stretch of innocence that the modern world robs from her peers.  She takes a child’s glee in tales of violence, but for her that means reading Treasure Island or seeing The Adventures of Robin Hood, and I like it that way.

Eventually, though, I allowed her to see bits of Julie Taymor’s version of The Tempest, and The Girl loved it enough that I started plotting the next step. Searching for something as child-friendly as possible, I happened upon a DVD of animated Shakespeare for children at the local library – by the usually-reliable BBC.  

They turned out to be strange and misguided adaptations, taking plays up to three hours long and reducing them down to 20 or 30 minutes, destroying everything but exposition and a few snippets of dialogue. The animation itself looked awkward and ugly, with Puck, for example, portrayed as a medieval squire in puffy pink clothes, like a male Snow White. Had the narrator not introduced each character directly, saying their name at the moment we first saw them, a casual observer would never have matched many of the drawings with their characters. Honestly, a forgettable teen comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You did a better job of interpreting Shakespeare – The Taming of the Shrew, in that case – than these Cliff’s Notes versions.

With no better stepping-stone, then, I took the plunge and showed her A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I picked the 1999 version, and remembered the always-charming Kevin Kline, but had forgotten how good the rest of the cast was: Sam Rockwell, Dominic West, Christian Bale, Sophie Marceau, Roger Rees and David Strahairn. It wasn’t perfect; Rupert Everett gave a strangely understated and horizontal performance as Oberon, and– while he’s an excellent actor, and does well – the bald and fiftyish Stanley Tucci was not an intuitive choice for Puck.

The Girl noticed none of this and loved it wholeheartedly, giggling at the touches of broad comedy that more jaded viewers ignore. She told everyone she saw the next day about Bottom flubbing his lines, for example, referring to the “odourous” queen as “odious,” or saying that his friends would “make an ass of me.” I pictured Elizabethans at the Globe Theatre laughing at the same lowbrow moments.

She also gets some references that I think a lot of modern audiences might miss, because of where she lives; Midsummer Night is the shortest night of the year, only a few hours long on these islands so far north. She also knows "where the oxlip and nodding violet grows," because we pick them together.

I had to explain many things as we went along, and she understood the basics; Lysander and Hermia want to be married, but Hermia’s father doesn’t like Lysander, Demetrius also loves Hermia, her father likes Demetrius, Helena loves Demetrius but he doesn’t love her, and so on. I enjoyed seeing the puzzlement and delight on her face at what to us is a hoary soap-opera device, which to her was new and brilliant. I had to gloss over the strange bit about the Indian boy; I suspect that was something Elizabethan audiences got better than we do.

I had not anticipated, however, how much she would need me to fill in a back-story, to the point of fan-fiction speculation. We adults don’t really need to know why Humphrey Bogart had to flee to Casablanca, or why Rhett Butler was so disreputable in society, but she is not used to filling in so many blanks.

“Why doesn’t Hermia’s father like Lysander?” she asked.

Um … I don’t think they ever say, I said.

“But isn’t there a reason?” she asked.

Well, back in those days, I said, people didn’t spend all their time around strangers, as they do now; everyone depended on their family, and did what was best for them. The family often arranged your marriage to someone if they wanted to make an alliance or get land, and you did what was best for everyone. If the families were too different, though, or enemies, they wouldn’t allow the marriage – maybe that was the case here.

“That’s horrible!” The Girl said.

Maybe, I said, but marriages were still arranged in Ireland fairly recently, and they still are in India – and they often seemed to be about as happy as marriages that started with romance. The feelings that draw people together, which you might start to feel in a few years, aren’t what keep people together. We call them both “love,” but they’re almost opposites.

“What do Lysander and Hermia feel?” she asked.

I think they’ll get both, I said – people usually do in stories, just because it makes a better story.

This year I’ve been easing her into the idea of sex, going over big-picture lessons of how living things – from redwoods to rhododendrons -- reproduce and spread. I gently brush against the subject of animal mating, when we see my farmer friend’s cows or our chickens, and she accepts the bits of information as I dole them out. I’ve also shown more films from the 1930s and 40s in which the man and woman kiss at the end, but nothing more adult -- not to forbid knowledge of sex, but to allow her to make the proper connections in a space of peace and innocence.

 

I forgot, though, that there is a moment toward the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the four lovers, now having been assembled into their proper relationships, are found naked in the grass. As a country girl, she’s unperturbed by discreetly implied nudity, but she did have a question.

“Were they mating?” she asked solemnly.

Yes, I said, they were, not pressing the issue right now. I’m glad you’re old enough to understand, and I think you might be old enough to see a play on stage later this year.

“Can I see that bloody one?” she asked.

Titus Andronicus? No.

“How old do I have to be to see it?”

Thirty-seven, I said. And a half. 

Top photo: Helen Mirren in The Tempest. 
Middle photo: Rupert Everett and Stanley Tucci in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 
Bottom photo: The Girl watching some mushrooms reproduce.