Month: May 2019

Since I spent the last entry on certain types of motion (motility), it is only fair that I spend some blogspace on beings that spend all or part of their lives fixed in place with no ability to move on their own.  These are called sessile organisms and have the characteristic of sessility.  ScrabbleMasters™ take note in case you find yourself saddled with a whole herd of “S’s”.  I guess you could try “psssst” and fight off the inevitable challenges and cries of outrage, resulting in the rarely practiced form of the game called CombatScrabble™.

Anyway, back to sessile organisms.  Most of these animals are found in a marine environment — examples are sponges, corals and anemones.  Another sessile animal is the barnacle, although in their larval stage barnacles do in fact move until they latch onto a solid surface, whereupon they spend the rest of their lives fixed in place.  These sessile creatures are very efficient since they don’t waste energy chasing down their food, relying instead on the movement of water to bring food to them, the zoological equivalent of Amazon Prime™.

Given their reliance on water currents, most of these sessile animals exhibit radial symmetry, to respond to food coming at them from any direction.  Also, I like the words “radial symmetry”, which might be a good name for a rock band.

 

I always associate lumbering with large ungainly animals like rhinos or hippos.  As they lumber toward you they kick up clouds of dust and the ground shakes beneath your feet.  Lumbering animals might seem clumsy, but I have always thought of them as very determined and their straight line destination inevitable.

Smaller animals might be said to trundle along, equally ungainly but not so substantial and fearsome as those beasts that lumber.  Raccoons and hedgehogs trundle as they careen along in their clever ways, operating just below our sight lines, little tricksters that they are.  Some objects like a suitcase trundle by rolling along on their little wheels, in fact the noun form of trundle is wheel.

If it’s nice outside we can take the long way round and go for an amble.   There we are bopping along with seemingly not a care in the world.  Nothing on the schedule today, perfect time for an amble.  Amble comes from the latin word ambulare, meaning to walk about.

Add an “sh”  and we become zombies lurching  along in a shambling walk.  Unless we are those real scary zombies that can run real fast, a situation which is totally unfair and breaks all the laws of zombie physics.

I can imagine Yeats wrestling with all these forms of motility before finally arriving at;

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

“Ambling” towards Bethlehem just doesn’t carry the same sense of dread as slouching, does it?

 

We have this centuries old relationship with animals.  They are our friends, our companions, our workmates, and more recently our YouTube™ stars.  We treat them as equals — except for the cats who are clearly our feline overlords.  We often receive pets from what we used to call “the pound” — now animal shelter — and these saved beings we refer to as rescue animals.

Depending on their age at being cast out and placed in the shelter, the rescue animal’s world view may be driven by instinct, survival and suspicion.  The new two-legged attendants will seem tenuous and strange and have an untrustworthy scent.  We simply don’t know where these animals have been or how they have been treated before arriving in our homes.

My daughter took in a rescue cat recently and is finding that its behavior is not as “personal” as she expected.  It is a nice cat and not a ball of hissing meanness, but it seems to lack certain personality traits that would make it more endearing, not to mention a future YouTube™ star.  Its style may also be a result of having been named Goose, but that is pure speculation on my part.

I think Goose just needs time to adjust to his new surroundings.  This may take awhile but before you know it Goose will be chasing shadows across the floor and leaping high over invisible rats, much to the delight of millions of adoring fans.

Taking in rescue animals is one of those things that we do that gives hope.  Despite our flaws and foibles, our ego and petty greed,  maybe we really are OK.  And when we save an animal, I wonder in turn if the animal saves us?

 

In the end we are all rescue animals, filled with doubt and history, learning to trust again down in the dirt where life happens.  When we reach up to touch our better angels, sometimes the angels reach back.