Since last I posted, the Shively-Blinns have been here, there and everywhere. Many of you saw us in our travels o'er the summer. Baby Aodh and Megan made a pilgrimage to the Abbey of Orval, in Belgium, for a L'Arche Covenant Companions Retreat. A. E. was the mascot. Megan was the person who fed him and attempted to handwash his wardrobe in the sink.
While there, Aodh discovered his love of cats. All monks have cats. Have you never made the acquaintance of Pangur Ban? He was a monastic cat and his monk wrote a poem in the margin of some manuscript (there is scholarly disagreement about which monk and which margin). This stanza came to mind when Aodh was chasing the cat round the place:
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
Into the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
'Cat' may well be Aodh's second baby sign. His first was 'more'. It took me at least a month to break his spirit and make his keen thought set take the meaning of the sign into its net--he gave me dagger eyes and slammed his hands down to his sides whenever I tried to get him to sign. Eventually, I played dumb long enough he and he wanted the butternut squash bad enough that he deigned to tap his hands together.
There is a lovely old monk named Hughes, which is the same as Hugh, and of course means "Aodh" in French. Maria told him a line about how Aodh is named for him from our previous visits to the place and he was completely touched. In fact, had I known his name I might have considered it. Anyway, he had his photo with Aodh, see below. If in some future life Aodh becomes a Trappist, a cat owner or a cheese addict, we can probably put it down to the week in Orval.
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