people I read

It had been a long time since we were able to have a cute spousal date. I feel like about half of that is my fault. Since both of us are foodies and I've had to watch my carbs, this naturally meant we had to cut back on quite a few of things we liked. Like the lovely Italian place on 24th St. I want to survive even though it opened in a lot where the owners (and shop cuisine) changes eerily frequently. Note to self, I should drag Seth back there at some point. We don't want nice food nearby to suddenly be cursed. I would eat anything on special at that place that was not calamari. I'm sure they do excellent calamari. It's really not my protein.

I found out in May that the Legion of Honor was hosting a momentous exhibit on the Etruscans, an otherwise obscure historical subject that Seth happens to have a big interest in. I actually learned about the Etruscans from Seth when I first moved to San Francisco. He told me about this little-known civilisation who scandalised the contemporaneous Greeks and Romans because their women participated as equals with the men at banquets. Greek and Roman women, by comparison, were kind of the prototype for the obedient, unseen woman hidden in the shadowed back rooms of the home. They wove a whole damn lot. To be fair, women of ancient civilisations (including the Etruscans) wove a whole damn lot in general because without machines to make cloth, the process really took up everyone's time. Incidentally. both genders contributed variously to spinning thread, because if cloth took time to make, it would take even longer if the people who didn't weave were not busy making the base material with idle hands. But, Etruscan women could own property. At least until they were conquered by the Romans, Etruscan women even kept and used solely their family names after marriage--and even under Roman influence, they suffixed the husband's surname to their for a while. While comparatively empowered in the social sense, Etruscan genders still did not have equal roles. Men still did the warring and most of the ruling, and women's sphere of influence was primarily the home. The Etruscans were apparently pretty keen on marital harmony too, with depictions in statuary and art showing couples lying together on couches in strong monogamous relationships. Again, not the most patriarchal and strictly functional reltionships common for their neighbours. (I mean, their neighbours thought male homosexual bonding was the height of nobility for crying out loud. Heterosexual sex was for making children.)

More importantly, even though the corpus of knowledge is growing, there's really still not much known about the Etruscans. Their culture was subsumed by the Romans, who took over their city-states. As the Legion of Honor exhibit notes, the Romans absorbed Etruscan knowledge on aquaducts and their numeral system. But over two centuries of conquest, it was the Etruscans who became Roman and lost their culture. We only really know about Etruscan literature from other civilisations mentioning their significant works. Their physical written works, which did in fact exist, were largely destroyed during conquest. Roughly 13,000 pieces of Etruscan writing still exist, most of which are rather short inscriptions scraped together from recovered artifacts and tombs. Because Etruscans were highly religious, their primary ruins still standing are necropolises and temples. You know a written language is in trouble when the longest extant piece of literature we have is 1,400 words found on linen wrappings around an Egyptian mummy some 17th century Czech guy bought as a souvenir in Alexandria. (Just a note, but the Czech guy's treatment of his souvenir is peak we do not do that anymore to historical artifacts. The female mummy was unwrapped and stood up for display with nails.) Historians can roughly read Etruscan text because they use a form of the Greek alphabet, but what the text means has largely only been inferred. The Etruscan language was from an isolate group, that is, unrelated to other known language groups. We don't have many bilingual texts to compare meanings. There is no Rosetta Stone. This is unbelievably as bad as the quipu. The quipu is an Andean method of recording done by knotting string, primarily as numerical notation but historians strongly suspect also for narratives. It was most famously used by the Inca. Spanish conquistadors found these piles of string heretical and burned most of them, thus we have about 1,400 quipu left in collections around the world. A majority of quipu still cannot be read due to lost technique. Even taking into account that not all quipu are whole records, they are records. This still sounds more numerous to me than 13,000 pieces of writing, most primarily a handful of words or less of a name on a statue or grave. 

Having said all this, The Etruscans was a marvelous exhibit. So many rare things I've only ever seen online or read about were on loan. There was the Liber Linteus--the aforementioned mummy wrappings, which actually document a religious calendar. My favourites were a statuette of a couple that is popularly cited as an example of the Etruscan emphasis on marital harmony and a bronze model of a sheep's liver used as a learning tool for hepatomancy (divining by animal entrails). The statuette is a tongue-in-cheek bronze sculpture of a man with one arm around his wife and the other hand groping her breast. The couple are actually gazing fondly at each other and the persons depicted looked to me at least in their forties. When I'd seen photos of the statuette before, I'd assumed it was fairly large, at least the size of a ceramic Madonna statuette, maybe one foot tall. This was because it was so detailed. As I said, you could clearly see the expressions on the couple's faces. In person, the statuette was tiny, probably shorter than my hand. The last time I felt so awed at seeing an artifact in person was probably when we visited the Catherine the Great exhibit in Melbourne and viewed real Old Masters paintings. The sheep liver model, the Liver of Piacenza, is another important example of Etruscan writing, but really, is mostly just super cool. I've read about people divining with animal entrails before and never thought once how you might teach that to apprentices. Turns out, you use detailed liver models with clearly marked zones attributed to your gods. That is legit awesome. The Etruscans sort of led the field of hepatomancy, as their Roman rulers were still sponsoring training for Etruscan diviners long after subjugation. There were examples of Etruscan metalworking in gold, pieces of jewelry but also things like vessels. The Etruscans specialised in granulation, which is basically soldering images on a metal surface using wee dots of molten metal. Very wee dots, some only slightly larger than the full stop at the end of this sentence.  I remember scanning over a goblet on display thinking, "Oh, another engraving," before realising the whole thing was really composed of thousands of tiny golden dots. An ancient artisan must have spent weeks if not months outlining every palm tree on that hand-sized goblet. A set of those and you could very well imagine them doing harm to their maker's eyesight. I basically dragged Seth over once I realised what this was to womansplain that to him. Once we noticed the granulation once, we couldn't un-see it. Like another bracelet on display where the granulated images of people with decorative border was done including on the inner side of the wrist. These were things made in 600 B.C. by hand. Even the bucchero (clay fired black and polished) pieces were amazing. The clay pieces were so well buffed they looked like wrought iron or black metal. Seth pointed out a cheeky black-on-red figure urn whose reverse side depicted a naked man gleefully reaching for a woman at a water basin, She looked back at the man and seemd quite horrified. Probably...these guys weren't married.

As I was about to leave for the gift shop, I caught sight of a small sign posted behind the entrance sayiing there was a complimentary audio tour to accompany all the exhibits, with instructions on how to connect to the museum's network and then scan QR codes on the placards. That nearly made me turn around and start touring the entire exhibit again. Yes, I had noticed people were looking at their phones and some were even holding it to their ears for narration. But the Legion of Honor's basement has no signal, so I assumed at the time these people were accessing a paid audio tour service. Also, I didn't bring headphones. Suitably aghast, I vowed not to make the same mistake when we come for the new exhibit on the Pharoahs in August. We are coming back in August. Seth and I fell prey to one of our greatest weaknesses--little old museum shopkeepers--and bought a discounted membership valid for one person and a guest. It almost immediately went into discounting our purchase of a book on the Etruscans. Pretty sure I'll also come home with some random book next time I'm there too. I don't usually do museum tchotchkes, though I might cave if some pretty glass scarab turns up. I'd be in trouble if they had nice faience tiles or beads.

Seth figured it out first. If a bird sounded angry in the backyard, someone should go check in case the cat was getting into trouble. We live in a neighbourhood filled with home gardens and trees, connected by backyards--and crawling with cats. I've spoken before how the low roof of the house running down the bottom of our backyard is a highway for the neighbourhood cats. The local raccoons also use it for plunder. The whole area is a great place to attract birdlife, but also incredibly perilous. Most of all, there is the cat, Moggie. Moggie the Mognificently Murderous. He's a goober who narrates his own chase sequences and my adorable, loving cat. He's the most cheerful murderer I know.

Moggie has gotten grounded more times in the past two months than he has in the whole three years he's lived with us. The first time, he brought home a dead sparrow. I locked him up for a day, and the night he was locked inside, he caught an indoor rat. Pretty sure it was a rat. I tried trading dried chicken treats for it. The cat dropped the sodden corpse, and before I could reach for it, picked up the rodent again and started to monch. I politely walked away out of sight, but still within hearing range in case there was trouble, until he walked up to me to let me know he needed more chimken. It's his new strategy. He shows us the stuff he got, runs away once we've noticed, and proceeds to eat his protein contribution so we can't confiscate it. I'm lucky in that he's a relatively clean eater. There was only one time I had to spirit away a head and guts (with gloves, thank you) that he left behind. I was actually sort of grateful he avoided the bits most likely to contain parasites. Even if I read that advice in a guide to butchering wild deer. Incidentally, I let the cat out the day after that and he came back with yet another sparrow--scaring us into thinking he found a nest--so back inside he went.

A week later, I got woken up because Seth heard our cat crying in a distressing way from the neighbour's yard. I got to the kitchen door just in time for us to watch the cat I call Black & White Friend, who would visit at 3AM to clean his butt in front of my cat through the window (the youth call this "aura farming"), dash across that low roof at the bottom of our yard back to where we presume his house was, followed shortly thereafter by our lousy cat who made sure he was chased back home. We clutched our foreheads and groaned. Moggie was unusually quiet when he returned late for his three o'clock lunch. His face was covered in scratches. He sulked when I wet wiped his wounds. The cat seemed exhausted and slept for the rest of the evening. At about six, I realised there was blood on the front and back of his left front paw. Seth noted his paw looked like it was crooked at a bad angle. I thought our cat might need antibiotics. Spouse thought our cat's leg might be broken. I phoned the nearby 24-hour pet emergency clinic, told them we were coming in and both of us walked there with the cat papoose. This is how we found ourselves waiting for two hours on a Sunday in the pet emergency ward. The pet clinic was slammed. A tech was able to triage our dude, but no vets were available to see him for both those hours. Instead, we watched other pet humans weep as they left visitation rooms, heard the miserable howls of a terrified dog we saw wheeled in on a gurney, and shared worried looks with the people also waiting to get their beloved friend checked. In the end, we brought home Moggie, unseen by a vet. We made the choice because the tech noted he was walking around and putting weight on his injured leg during triage, so his bones were probably not broken, plus, he did not seem to have openly bleeding wounds, just residual blood from cuts. Since it was a Sunday, we planned to go to the SPCA Hospital's urgent care on Monday if the cat looked worse. 

By the next morning, Moggie had cleaned the wounds he wouldn't let me touch himself. He was still mostly tired but definitely hungry. By that evening, he was hopping onto my desk to tell me his feelings about my playing MMOs. My cat literally slapped some spit on his wounds and got well in less than a week. By the third day inside he was basically mad we wouldn't let him out to play, even though his face was still so scratched up I worried he was finally turning into a pirate. I think we managed to keep him inside for roughly seven days. I have not seen Black & White Friend since. I've been hoping my cat's wounds were all defensive, so that means the other guy got away unscathed after fighting Moggie off. Spouse and I are in permanent despair over our cat's hobby of having rude conversations with other people's cats.

Moggie currently has a faint but visible scar across his nose. I'm genuinely amazed he hasn't nicked his ear yet. He got a pretty sizeable scab on the back of one ear from that fight. And not even two weeks later, we heard the angry chirps of birds in our backyard.

The first few days of this, we would go, whoever was free at that moment, to stand in the yard each time the birds were particularly loud and prevent a Terrible Tragedy. We narrowed down the chirps to two particular birds that were clearly putting their all into provoking Mogs and keeping his attention at all times while he was outside. After comparing our blurry, barely detailed photos with online city bird guides, I figured out what we had were California towhees. We read about their nesting habits (cup nests at a height of 1 to 13 ft. off the ground), brood size (two to three eggs) and brood time (six to ten days). Seth got this idea their nest was probably in one of the very tall mounds of vines on the back fence. I would pointedly remind our cat to think about the person who has to bury his bodies, please. A good number of afternoons, we brought the cat back inside early owing to close calls. One time, Seth caught Moggie mid-flight towards one of the birds. Another evening, he pried the cat off our neighbour's balustrade before he could dash across the fence after a bird. The whole thing was turning everyone goofy in the head. I know one day I saw a bird deliberately run across the ground to get Moggie's attention and asked aloud, "Are you actually suicidal? Is that how you're choosing to die?"

I regret comitting such a great disservice to parents so clearly putting their own lives in danger to protect their young. I should've recognised what was going on better, but days of worrying after cat, birds and every alarmed chirp had really strained our minds. One time, the cat was inside with just the screen door closed and a bird flew up to my planter to chirp at the cat from closer range. I remember telling Seth I no longer understood their relationship. At a certain point, I even thought we should let urban nature take its course because these birds clearly moved into our neighbourhood knowing it was covered in predators. They were probably streetwise birds.

On July fourth, in the late afternoon, we were at our desks when I heard our cat let out one of his particular sad warbles. He has a sad warble to let the cat colony know he brought back prey. More importantly, this was that warble but muffled. I run over to the cat, who has a mouth full of feathers, and try to pry open his jaws. What pops out are two entire fledgelings. Moggie's logic probably was if he got two, then he'd at least be able to keep one. These were not chicks, these were obviously smaller versions of adult birds. Seth immediately swooped in and carried the cat away. During removal, one of the fledgelings had died...unkindly. The other was warm and breathing. I brought it back outside, put it on some nice moss under the bush both of its parents were chirping loudly on and went back to bury the other. It was genuinely heartbreaking to hear the parents call after their kids. Unfortunately, I came back later and the other fledgeling was also dead. Buried that one too. We didn't see the parents after that. Two days later, raccoons came and recycled the dead birds from their graves. 

I still feel guilty for scolding the birds luring away my cat when I did. Naturally, both of us feel extremely guilty we contributed to the plunging bird population...again. To be honest, if he had gotten a pigeon or an inland seagull, I would have still been upset but also been willing to let it slide as one less flying varmint. From experience, pigeon nests are health and sanitation liabilities to clean after. If we had the presence of mind, which we didn't, we would've immediately locked up Moggie for a month after reading about California towhees. I have not since heard birds in our yard, although I'm sure they're there (or at least I hope so). I only half-jokingly note to Seth we have created Silent Spring. Neither one of us blames our cat nor have we ever been angry at Moggie for being a cat. I mean, from the poor guy's perspective, he keeps bringing home all this nourishing protein to the cat colony and we won't even share our chicken dinners back. But the next time we hear angry bird calls, we'll be ready. And after a month of cat tantrums, probably even way more goofy in the head.