the.grandest.tiger.in.the.jungle@gmail.com

Mary and I spoke this morning -- the first day of the "fall back" from daylight savings time to Mountain Standard Time. I wondered who was calling at 6 am. Rhiannon wanted someone to speak with, someone to tell she was going to Sunday School and that her dog is going to play with its friends, the beagles who live at the house where Mary is going to dip chocolates.

Yes.

A little early for dipping chocolates, unless you like to eat your fill long before Christmas Day, in which case it is the perfect time to get started. I gave Mary all of my candy equipment. Not a real gift, unless a person wants the bull dog and dinosaur plastic moulds that they can remember from their childhood. In the box she was searching through, she found another second-hand treasure, heavy molds that are the shape of a hazel nut, where gianduja cam be inserted in the mold with a hazel-nut treasure inside. I never did learn how to get the chocolates to drop out of that mold – one of the tasks I now get to drop off of my to-do list, since Mary has taken the equipment off of my hands. One of those second-hand store treasures that I couldn’t pass up and now crying to be passed on.

Mary told me that she has been talking to Bonnie, who is a stay-at-home mom for 2 months now. Joaquim went out to put posters up for Spanish tutoring up, on his first day as a go-to-work dad. At the dinner table David asked him, “How was your first day of Spanish tutoring dad?”, and Joaquim answered, “I had a good day David.”

“Are you good at Spanish,” David continued.

“Oh, I am quite good,” said Joacquim surprised that David didn’t know, since he speaks to him so much in Catalan.

David pursued the conversation, testing Joaquim’s Spanish against every French word David knows.

“Do you know how to say le chat? “

“Yes.

“Do you know how to say la citrouille?”

Nice. They have a multi-lingual house there. David checking out Joaquim's Spanish via his own limited French vocabulary.

Mary and I were laughing, because she said that even though Rhiannon doesn’t have a large spoken English vocabulary, yet, she does seem to know who her dog is friends with when he is going to visit the household that also has beagles.

Speaking on the phone to grandchildren has its own twists and turns. Bonnie called one day because David Doral wanted to talk to a tiger. I was it. I deepened my voice and had a conversation with him. Since then I have sent him emails from the.grandest.tiger.in.the.jungle@gmail.com.(Before I became a tiger) I emailed him some tiger freeward images so accessible on Google. I sent him a postcard, as well, one Miranda had printed off when she was testing her computer. The colours were brilliant, on a glossy paper postcard, and I thought Miranda’s test deserved recycling. I dropped David a note on it, inviting him to come and visit me in my jungle. He returned the compliment by asking me to come and visit him at the Shuswap. I had to declined.

(London, before I became a tiger)

“Too difficult to get a passport,” I said. ”And while I have an abundance of free food here in the jungle, I would need money to buy a passport. So I won't be coming to visit."

At Halloween I continue the fiction, telling him that I was dressing up – going as a baboon.

Bonnie says he seems to believe he is talking to a real tiger.

I thought Bonnie and I were busted last weekend, for I talked to David and then to her. At the end of our conversation she said, “Good bye, Arta.”

David said, “Is tiger, Arta?”

Bonnie called me back on the telephone.

“Tiger? David says I called you Arta.”

Now on speaker I replied, “I heard that too. You did call me, Arta. If you want to talk to her, you should call her. I want to be called my real name: Tiger.”
What a miracle. Cheap long distance.

When I was young a long distance call was expensive, only made when there was a death in the family.

Growl,

Tiger