Interview Answers #2 - The Rest of the Books

The 'Everything Else' Category. It's interesting actually, that I have more childhood books that come to mind - although there is quite obviously a strong commonality between all the novels that carries over to this day.

Childhood books:

The War Between the Pitiful Teachers & The Splendid Kids, Stanley Kiesel

A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L'Engle

The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis

James & The Giant Peach, Roald Dahl

The Bunjee Venture, Stan McMurty

The Borrowers Series, Mary Norton

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The Collected Poems of Robert Service

The next two - I've never read the others / sequels / follow-ups and probably never will but I find that these two books serve well to remind me of many things that I need to be more mindful of for believing in myself and being true to that belief. I reread them usually once every 1 to 2 years, usually at turning points in my life. They give me courage. They encourage me.

Conversations With God, Neal Donald Walsch

The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck, MD

Animals Nobody Loves, Ronald Rood. This one was written in 1971 and I've had it since I spelled my name Jennie, so at least 25 years. It's pretty beat-up these days. It's a book written by a naturalist in defense of the animals that mankind 'hates' due to the way the act or look. It's a slim book but it covers rats, wolves, bats, snakes, eels, spiders, fleas, mosquitoes, octopus (octopi?), vultures, pigs, and coyotes. It tries to make you see them from a different perspective and it's incredibly well done. This excerpt, although long, is one of my favourites:

Ordinarily, you don't expect much from a tankful of crabs. Of course, stick your finger down among them and you might be sorry; give them a dead fish and it's reduced to a skeleton. Crabs can pinch, bite, run and swim - and that's about all. Probably nobody in his right mind expects a crab to fly.

But that's what the crabs seemed to be doing in the marine aquarium. Or perhaps they were climbing up the sheer walls of the tank, over the edge and out to freedom where nobody ever saw them again. In either case, every day the caretaker would count the crotchety crustaceans and every day there would be a few less. Obviously the crabs were going somewhere? But where? And how?

Then somebody noticed that the crabs hadn't disappeared entirely. Half hidden among the scenery at the bottom of the tank were a few relics: a claw here, a leg there; plus a bodyshell or two, opened expertly as a connoisseur would open a crab - top half separated from the bottom half , and contents scooped out.

That last discovery did it. To the knowledgeable scientists there was only one creature dextrous enough for such a job. Somehow, an octopus must have been dumped into the tank with a load of crabs. Now it was hiding among the material on the bottom, quietly helping itself to a gourmet meal whenever it wished.

So the authorities set about to remove the prankster. Carefully checking each corner of the tank, they stood ready to collar the culprit when they flushed him out.

But - no octopus. Every potential hiding place, and those that weren't so potential, drew a blank. Knowing the capacity of the octopus to change color and pattern to match its surroundings, the caretakers paid special attention to the bottom debris, thinking their quarry might be hiding in plain sight. Still no octopus.

Yet all those crabs hadn't just up and died. They hadn't had an underwater war, either. There just had to be an octopus. But where?

The answer lay in a nearby tank. Nestled in its cubbyhole, gazing innocently out on the world, was the ancient nemesis of crabdom. Its body gently rising and falling as it passed water over its gills and let it out through its siphon, the octopus quietly breathed in its almost-human way and quietly looked with its almost-human eyes. Obviously nobody could ever expect such a guileless creature. Besides, how would it get from this tank to that one?

A little sleuthing on the part of its human keepers solved the mystery. The octopus waited until the aquarium had closed down for the night, and then it simply went out for supper.

Reaching up above the surface of the water where it stayed so peacefully all day, the octopus clamped a few suckers of an arm or two to the glass of its aquarium. Even as it hauled itself up, more suckers were reaching forward for a fresh grasp, and so it flowed up to the top of the glass. Then down the other side, over to the crab tank, up the glass and down again - and the delightful bonanza of an after-hours feast.

But that's the way it is with the octopus. It not only has the ability to size up the situation, but it has the capacity to do something about it. Many scientists, after watching the behaviour of this eight-armed cousin of the lowly clam, have come to the conclusion that it is about the most intelligent creature in the invertebrate world. And that's taking into account the marvelous actions of ants and bees, too.