News From Hawkhill Acres

Maybe it’s not every October. Maybe it’s randomly distributed around the year and I just remember it as always happening in the fall. Whatever the reality, the Berrymans have another CD out, The Universe:14 Examples. As usual, I like all the songs, but there are one or two that stand out. If you go to their website and click on lyrics and scroll down to Track 4: Artiste Interrupted, you’ll find the ultimate ADD song. My kids, who have been diagnosed with ADD, pegged it the minute they heard it and were falling about laughing for the rest of the day whenever they thought of a scrap of the lyrics.

The song before that song, about whether your dog agonizes, is a hoot too as are most of the songs on the CD. They hit the nail on the head or the thumb, I guess, and describe the human condition as it exists in our neck of the woods. Like Peter and Lou, we have trouble giving and receiving presents, have our ups and downs - sometimes simultaneously - and we have a dog who invented hangdog.

We like Sea Chanteys, but can’t understand a word the singers say in some of them. And the geek and I are so old that we remember when ketchup wasn’t red and we had to walk uphill to school - both ways.

Also as usual, when I got the CD, I had to fight to listen to it. It seems like, whenever I get one of the Berryman’s CDs, the universe keeps throwing roadblocks in front of my listening to the thing. First, the geek had a chimichanga malfunction and almost burned the house down - or at least the microwave - so we had to abandon ship and go out to eat while Geekdaddy put on his hearing protectors and revved up the leafblower to blow out the stink.

For some reason, the geek can’t nuke things like other people do. If it says to cook the thing at full power for two minutes, he figures what they really mean is that you should cook it for 12 minutes at ten percent. Of course, that means that you have to hit 1 for cook power on the microwave oven, not 10. Ten is full power and will frizzle your burrito into a charred lump and fill the house with choking black smoke in minutes. This is what happened last night when Geekdaddy fumbled the finger function on the keypad.

Son, who is having trouble with his asthma right now, was the first to notice that something was amiss or agley. He alerted Geekdaddy, who yelled to Daughter and I who were down in my basement lair, researching nifty toys. We sprinted up the stairs, opened the door, noticed the thick black smoke and headed for the exit, sweeping the dog and two crouching cats along with us.

Son and Daughter stayed at Uncle Wil’s while I opened windows in the basement and upstairs in their bedrooms, gathered shoes for both of them and grabbed my car keys. With an admonition to the geek not to inhale any more smoke than he had to, we were off like snowflakes on the west wind or something similar, leaving the geek to render the house habitable before we returned.

He managed to get most of the smoke out, although the kitchen, dining room and living room still smell like the aftermath of a bonfire that was fueled by rancid marshmallows. The smell just goes right up our noses and stays there. The geek, on the other hand, who has very little sense of smell thinks it smells like someone burned a little bit of popcorn. Yeah, if by little bit he means a little bit of a forty acre field.

Anyhow, this morning I had work to do and couldn’t listen to the CD, so tonight Daughter and I settled into my recliner with wine (for me) and grape juice (for her) and listened to the whole thing. It was unschooling at its best. I had to pause the thing several times to explain some words, including pachyderm, thesaurus, chiaroscuro and a few other terms.

I thought as we listened how so much of our learning takes place before and after the hours that the public schools are open. By the time we’d listened to the whole CD, she’d figured out that MG&E stands for Madison Gas and Electric, gotten an explanation of anthropomorphic and used it in a sentence, commented that Peter seems a little more depressed and Lou a little more manic than they did on the last CD, and noticed that there were only 14 songs, so that was more than a dollar a song unlike their last CD.

It’s funny. Like a lot of unschooled kids, she’s both more sophisticated and less mature than most kids her age. She still plays with baby dolls, stuffed animals and likes books that are “too young for her”, according to society’s standards. However, because she’s with me so much and not sequestered with twenty other same-age kids, she knows a lot more about the real world than most ten year olds. And, of course, because her brother died a year and a half ago, she knows more than I wish she knew about life and death.

While most kids her age are bopping to popular radio stations and the music on Nick and Disney, she’s listening to Junie B. Jones audiobooks, my eclectic collection of CDs and whatever attracts her in the world around her. She sings a lot to tunes that she makes up herself and whistles cheerfully as she takes out the dog and rides her bike in the driveway. She’s a cheerful kid who likes music.

So when the mail brings a brown envelope from Madison, Wisconsin, she perks up her ears and is just as anxious as I am to listen to the CD inside. She’s been listening to Lou and Peter since she was an infant and I’ve been listening to them since the geek and I got hitched, lo these many years ago. If you haven’t heard them, give them a listen. If you have, then I’m sure you’re already humming along to “Does Your Dog Agonize”.

We’ve decided that ours doesn’t agonize, but she sure has perfected the hangdog look when we come home and find that she’s gotten into the cat food and eaten the soap. We’ll think of Lou and Peter every time she puts her head down and looks shamefacedly at us over her Black Lab snout. Give them a listen and you’ll be humming along too.

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