Beltane Waxing Garlic Moon
Pentheus gets ripped apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes. The Guthrie’s production of The Bacchantes by Euripides several years ago gave the story a telling I’ve never forgotten. It gave me a jolt. I’ve moved on from Diana and Actaeon in Ovid to Pentheus. His story begins about 250 verses further on in Book III of the Metamorphosis. I’m not far into it, only about 12 verses, but already Pentheus’ fate has been foreshadowed by the great seer, Teresias.
My tutor says I’ve learned to spot and translate the verbs, a key first move, but I still have trouble picking out the subjects of the sentences. That’s what I have to work on for next week.
(Pentheus and his mom. Pompeii. Romersk ca. 70 e. Kr. (Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen)
Speaking of getting ripped apart, I came home from a lunch with Justin Fay, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist, to find Kate gone. She had taken Gertie, our son and his wife’s dog, to the vet. Yet another scrap broke out and this time Gertie ended up with seven spots that needed stitches. The end result of this was, of course, a hefty vet bill and a hurried consultation between Denver and Andover over Gertie’s fate.
We resolved it this way. Gertie has become a liability at Jon and Jen’s, growling at Gabe, 3 years old, nipping four neighbors and going after the postman, not to mention climbing the fence to get out. So. What to do? I really like Gertie; she has a big personality, a bouncy vital way, but she is a mischief maker, a trickster. Gertie will stay here with us and we’ll figure out how to manage our pack without any one getting hurt. We’ve had to do it before when one of our Irish Wolfhound’s, Tully, decided that our Whippets were prey.
First step is to get Sollie back to Denver so we can reduce the number of dogs. After that we’ll probably try letting Gertie and the big girls out again, hoping that the changed dynamics will have resolved. If we have another spat, we’ll have to go to some management strategy, maybe a dog run outside, or having Gertie and one big dog at a time out.
We have Mark here now and Gertie will stay. We’ve become a hostel.
