Re-contextualizing Froggie Went a Courtin' Part 3

Re-Contextualizing Froggie Went a Courtin' Part 3

Some of you may have been following the saga of Froggie my African Dwarf Frog (ADF) which I bought at Jay's Jungle in Provo a year ago this month. He or she is tiny only about 2 inches in length and so small that you really can't read the expression on its face. I am confused about the sex of this little underwater frog because when I introduced a second younger frog from Petco to the small tank the younger frog was more assertive and within a few minutes was mounted on the elder frog's back. So I thought we might have a breeding pair and I'd better find out about how to raise ADF's. I have a book on order but in the meantime I searched the internet and joined a couple of ADF aficionado Facebook groups. Apparently what I thought would be an uncomplicated, no work required, pet experience was going to be anything but. These people are frog-freaks who spend a lot of time and money on their frog babies and do not countenance what they consider helpless-animal-neglect in keeping the water clean, ph balanced and the perfect temperature. I decided to stay low profile on this group

I have to admit I was pretty fond of Froggie until I began to suspect that she is a Black Widow who will not tolerate interlopers in her now cushy10 gallon tank, a big upgrade from the under one gallon bowl I kept her in for the better part of a year until I began to feel guilty of neglect. I had inherited most of the paraphernalia from my grandson who had a goldfish that died. The bigger tank was my way of apologizing to Froggie for not filtering or even changing her water very often being afraid of getting Samonella. The nice sales associate at Petco talked me into a filter adequate for my tank which did seem roomy enough for a friend so I brought home Little Frank who apparently was an annoyance to Grogina we now called her “Gina” for short. But their relationship went south and before a week was out Frank laid pale and lifeless at the bottom of the tank and Gina stood watch. I interpreted it as grief but have later learned when I called Petco and spoke with Kristin that sometimes the older Alfa Frog will harass and stress out the newcomer. One feels like a detective sorting out all the clues. On a subsequent trip up north I revisited Petco and turned in Frank who had been chillin' in our fridge in a pill container. Jaden was very understanding and gave me a replacement ADF and made sure I bought some new filters for the tank.

Ka-ching ka-ching. In for a penny in for a pound. But unfortunately "Newbie" died as well of undetermined causes only a few days after he had been given a very hostile treatment when I put him in the "Trump Tank". Froggie was vicious and I had to separate them immediately. Newbie only lasted a couple of days. I will not be bringing home any more frogs for the Black Widow to badger to death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xf0FSNt51A

Good News Utah

Good News Utah

Dave and I have been here in central Utah for nearly two and a half years. We came to be near our kids and grandkids. It has been a big change but a wonderful adventure.
 There is a ministry here that started in Ephraim 25 years ago where there was no Christian Church. Check out www.Trigrace.org. Our son Ned and his wife Sarah met as interns for Trigrace and served as missionaries to the Snow College students. Ned invited us to move out here, found us a great apartment and actually moved us here. What a great son and follower of Jesus he is! He is currently living and working up north with his family but we see them every couple of weeks.

So the good news is that the gospel is going forth in Utah even though it is overwhelmingly Mormon influenced. There is a lot of need for laborers in this harvest field. Please pray about coming or sending laborers.

We had a great visit this week from old friends, Ross and Wendy Grobe, who I have known for nearly 48 years since we were on the Evangelistic Team together in Weott CA and traveled up and down the West coast and across country twice setting captives free with the Good news of Jesus Christ. Many of you may have heard of the Jesus Movement that hit the west coast in the early 70's. The Grobes and I were in Gospel Outreach out of northern CA which sent out teams to establish churches in Central America and Eurpe. I lived in Munich Germany with the team there for 2.5 years just before I came home for my Dad's illness. That's when I met Dave and Boston and surrounds became our mission field and where we raised our 3 sons.

So we did not see much of the Grobes as they were in San Diego, in fact Dave and Ross had never met until this week but we all had a great time catching up and exploring the Manti-Lasal Forest in an ATV they rented.

Not My Father's Somerville

                

                   Not My Father's Somerville       May 1, 2020

                 

 Written for the Patch when they were turning Somerville into a Sanctuary city, Not My Father's Somerville...

My Dad grew up near Union Square in Somerville the youngest of five children of Irish immigrants. His mother died when he was seven and his older sister, Mame, took over the maternal duties for her four brothers. My grandparents had a reputation for hospitality and a visitor to their two-family house would always be offered a bite to eat and something for their thirst. That was Irish tradition.

When a shipload of Irish immigrants came in to Boston, I was told my grandmother who came here as a newlywed would go down to the ship, look for faces from home and bring them back to her house if they needed a place to land their first night in America.

My Dad as a little boy remembers sometimes waking up with strange children in his bed. At some point, while deep asleep, he was gently turned crossways so that a couple of tiny pilgrims could fit along side him.

I have no memory of my Grandpa who died when I was three and all I know is that he was very kind and gentle, gracious to visitors and that he worked on the “El” or the elevated trains which ran roughly above where the Orange Line runs today and eventually was able to buy a two-family house near Union Square.

Some of us can remember the dark and thunderous noise of the El over Canal Street that was torn down in the ‘80’s to make way for modernization and the Big Dig.
For a decade we lived in Medford after raising our family out in Worcester County, I sometimes used the Orange Line and as I rode from Wellington past Sullivan Station I tried to imagine what my Grandpa would have done on the El. Would he have announced the stops in an Irish brogue? This would have been quite familiar to most of the passengers since the El served the Irish neighborhoods?

Riding on the trains these days I usually hear an incomprehensible announcement in English, I presume, but with a thick accent that I can’t quite unravel. Since I’m kind of new to the T, having moved in from the boonies, I look around to see if others are having trouble understanding the announcement. Virtually everyone is engrossed in their smart phone or have earphones wired to something and look lost in their audio/digital world. There is no eye contact at all. I squint at the map signage which is not large enough to be read from my vantage point hoping I have not missed my stop.

On the return trip I look excitedly out the windows like a little kid, watching the rapid changes in the landscape. There was the coming and going of the horse extravaganza, Cavalia, the construction site of the new high rise apartments and high-end shopping outlets opening in Assembly Row near my stop, Wellington Station.

Just over the Mystic River from Somerville is Medford, a city where once a proud sailing ship building center thrived. In recent decades Medford has been known as a haven for crime families which kept a kind of order on the street as in the North End and East Boston, but that is changing as more and more immigrants arrive.

On the eve of our Memorial Day celebration Mayor Joseph Curatone of neighboring Somerville decreed total amnesty and protection for illegals and, as he’s seen Governor Patrick and President Obama do, tried his hand at bypassing the US Constitution and Rule of Law which countless numbers have given their lives and limbs to protect.

The assaults are coming “Fast and Furious” upon our freedoms as the legislature debates a Gun Law that aims to limit the Second Amendment, while Mayor Bloomberg rallies mayors and Harvard grads to further disarm the populace. Ironically and sadly the graduating students are up in arms about sexual assault on campus.

We are living in cities with scores of Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders, yet the current regime pushes for no accountability for illegals and more gun control for citizens; meanwhile a home invasion and brutal rape took place in neighboring Arlington.

.To cut to the 2020 chase here for political power I applaud the Rayla Campbell candidacy in hopes for a return to law and order.

I am appalled by the proposal for Polyamory.   https://ifapray.org/blog/polyamory-is-here-and-i-predicted-this/

If Somerville and Cambridge, the city of my birth, keep up their slouching to Gomorrah they could end up with the same fate.

 The "Sacred Cod" in the State House swimming upstream.

Born for the USA

By Chris Funnell | July 4, 2017, New Boston Post

Now summer is in full bloom, and due to abundant rains, gardening has become a game of catch-up, weeds need pulling, and the mosquitoes are ferocious. Whenever I feel like giving up on a job like that to plop on the couch with a bag of chips, instead I have been inspired to persevere by the autobiography of an amazing woman and true patriot.

 

Elly Matz immigrated to America more than sixty-five years ago from Ukraine, realizing her childhood dream to come to the land she first heard about on her father’s knee. Her ancestors had gone in the other direction, migrating in the 1760s with many other settlers from Germany to the fertile farmland south of Russia. Born in 1920, three years after the Russian Revolution, Elly saw the demise of her people’s way of life as the farms were being taken by the communists and divided up.

 

Not long after age 6, when she first stated her intent to move to America when she grew up, life began to get very hard and starvation became a daily threat. The German farmers who were once welcomed in to farm the black soil were now enemies of the communists who starved and imprisoned them. Elly knew no real childhood because, being strong and healthy, she was needed to work when her father grew too weak. Eventually, her father was taken to prison never to be seen again.

 

She married at 16, and on a visit to her family’s village when she was a young mother about to give birth to her second child, she discovered her Babushka, mother, and little sisters had all been taken to Siberia, along with whole villages of Germans born in Ukraine. She was treated like a stranger in her own land during World War II, not accepted by Russia or Germany, but useful as a translator. She was on her own after her husband was killed at the front, and she determined to leave what she knew would be certain slavery at the hands of the communists to run for her life with her 5-year-old son. (Her second child had died soon after birth.)

 

Elly’s autobiography It Was Worth It All is a great remedy for the times we live in, when the framers of our Constitution are seen on college campuses as “dead white guys” and the foundational writings they sweated over in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia routinely go under the judicial activist’s knife. If you want to find refreshing and unabashed patriotism, talk to an immigrant who has escaped the Red Army’s (or other despots’) assault on freedom.

Elly survived starvation, disease, beatings, bombings, labor camps, and concentration camps. She even survived her own attempt to take her own life to escape the misery she had known so long during the war and its aftermath. She figures she was destined to make it here to the land of her dreams to tell us how wonderful freedom is and to warn us about what can happen to a nation that forgets God.

Elly died in 2012, so she is no longer traveling and telling her story at schools, churches, and conferences, and to whomever will listen. America has what she and others have longed for – freedom.

 

I can still hear her words of concern for her beloved America seeing where the Obama administration was headed. Old age slowed down her freedom march but she never stopped thanking God for her miraculous deliverance into her land of promise.

Stories like Elly’s need to be told and retold to generations who take our freedoms for granted. A passionate immigrant and grandmother gave her all because, in her words, she “wants to know what hands this country is gonna be left in.”

 

Chris Noonan Funnell is a local columnist.  An earlier version of this article appeared in the July 4, 2003 edition of The MetroWest Daily News and in the third printing of Elly Matz’s autobiography.

Froggie Went a Courtin'

Well yesterday I took Froggie's bowl out to the deck to warm in the morning sun. I had taken him in the night before at Dave's urging because it was going to be cold, in the 30's and after all Dave said "He is an African frog." So I brought him in but I couldn't see him as he must have been hiding in the pagoda I put in the day before thinking he needed somewhere to get out of the sun. I don't know if African frogs are subject to sunburn but the sun at this altitude is very strong. The pagoda is tall and actually rises a couple of inches above the water line. It takes up a lot of his swimming room which had I enjoyed watching when he seemed to be taking exercise. I am going to have to get him a bigger bowl. Anyway when I looked for him in the light on the deck I could not see him. I pulled out the pagoda and looked in the bowl, nada, just the blue and clear smooth glass stones that rested on the bottom. I looked in the hollow of the faux-stone pagoda, to my shock he was nowhere to be found. I called to Dave in alarm. "Dave, Froggie is gone!" Immediately I thought a predator, probably a bird, plucked him out of the bowl while we were out for an evening walk. Probably when I had moved the bowl inside he was not there because I hadn't actually laid eyes on him the night before or while he was in the house due to that pagoda. We had bought him at a pet store last fall and he was quite tiny. I had had one when the boys were little who was big enough to eat mosquitoes and even houseflies we'd caught in the house to my great satisfaction. His underwater singing used to keep Ned awake he had complained as a 4 year old. So there was a certain nostalgia that came with Froggie though he payed no attention to any fresh delicacies I put in his bowl and lived on the desiccated frog food the man at the shop rightfully urged me to buy. But now he was gone. Froggie we hardly knew you. Being a writer I was already composing his obituary but Dave had quickly roused from his computer, dressed and though I tried to explain what I had imagined happened he was down on the ground under our second floor deck looking in the gravel. What is he doing? I thought. Had Froggie escaped via climbing on top of his pagoda , hopping as frogs are wont to do out of the confines of his too small bowl, free at last, free at last! Off on a grand adventure. Strains of "Froggie Went a'Courtin'" hummed in my ear while Dave, still searching the ground beneath our deck, said he couldn't have lasted long down here if a robin had seen him. A murderous robin guiltily looked down from a tree. I looked down in sadness thinking what a waste of his little life when I spied something flailing in the grass beneath me. I was delighted to see little Froggie all two of his inches extended in effort as he is not a land creature. Had he fallen a few inches further he'd have hit the road and been squished by the vehicles that come and go. But Froggie was a survivor. "Dave, There he is! Can you believe it!" Dave scooped him up and soon he was returned to his pagoda-less bowl where he has been resting quietly indoors on the kitchen counter ever since where I can keep an eye on him after his big mystery adventure because we still don't know how he ended up in the yard beneath the deck.


 Today I went to the IFA store for some plants and a look around inside. I like to look at the baby chicks and cowgirl boots. Lots of things marked down due to the change in season. I then went to Tractor Supply to look at their plants and their baby chicks. I found a kit for growing Venus Fly Traps which is a plant that eats meat, like flies. i have to grow them from seed but I am so glad to have found the kit which included a tiny plastic frog. I put it next to Froggie's bowl and he seems pretty interested in his new found friend. Dave and I went for a walk tonight and i noticed the moon is extra large but it is not full yet. I hope Froggie doesn't try to hop out of his bowl again. Pet care can be so exhausting.

I put the plastic frog in the bowl to see what Froggie would do but as I suspected he was too lightweight and went belly up. Not a very convincing playmate for Froggie. The next time we go north to a pet shop in Provo we will bring back a friend for Froggie. We may even get a tank for him. Planted the Venus Fly Trap seeds. They take 6 weeks to germinate. Can't wait to see one chomp on a fly.
 In case you think me cruel to flies just remember that Ole Beezelbub ist ein Fliegen!

Continuation June 22, 2020
So on our trip north to celebrate father's day with Ned and Sarah we stopped at Petco in Spanish Fork in hopes of bringing home a friend for Froggie. Once i got a salesperson to help he showed me the one Dwarf Frog left. Apparently they keep selling out because on our last trip north we called 2 Pet store chains and they were all out. The associate who helped me asked if I had a filter and I said no. He suggested I get one especially if i was going to have 2 because without it they would slowly drown being unable to get air from the dirty water. He suggested a good one for my size tank. I hastly got their last frog and the filter and we were on our way.
I had a small carrier to keep him/her in. Somehow i had thought of Froggie as a male in need of female companionship and so the new acquisition being so pale in color and about half the size of Froggie became in my thinking a female which I named Gorfetta, This was a concession to Dave who called our first frog "Gorf" for frog spelled backwards and i feminized the name a tad. I decided to just put their tanks side by side for a while untill I cleaned the 10 gallon tank that was rather large for one lonely Froggie and it seemed they were seeing or hearing each other and sidling up to the tank side nearest each other. This comforted me because i had a terrible dream in which the larger frog swallwed the newcomer in one gulp.
So in the morning I determined to clean the big tank and start fresh with the new filter and the newcomer frog who looked like a juvenile next to Froggie senior. The moment of truth had come so we scooped up Froggie with a little net and he gave us a run for our money and it took many tries to finally catch him and transfer into the small temporary tank with Gorfetta.  Once in the small container I watched closely for any sign of aggression from Froggie. To my surprise the smaller frog seemed more curious and actually came close to the larger. I went to get my camera and when i came back I was surpised again to see the little new guy mounted on the back of the larger who did not seem offended and they stayed that way for a while as i went to tell Dave who had fallen asleep but i was so amazed at this turn events i woke him with the news that Froggie was a female and the new frog was the male! Right away I started rethinking names. Froggie was renamed Gina and the new frog was named Frank.
Time will tell if we got it right. There is so much to learn in the reptilian kingdom.
So that's how i became a frog grandparent(maybe) with a 10 gallon tank to keep clean and frogs that are not to be fed flies or mosquitoes which was my original motivation. Maybe i can parlay this into a profit making business since the stores seem to have a shortage of Dwarf frogs. I wonder what happens to them. i hope they don't use them for fights like Bettas. Not cool!
I do find fly swatters give a lot of satisfaction and my Venus Fly Traps are hopefully going to give a lot of entertainment too even though it has been 7 weeks and no sign of germination..

So to sum up the Re-contextualization that Bruce Springsteen has spoken of in relation to the old song "Froggie Went a Courtin'"
It seems like Frank is the one who went a courtin and he was very quick at it. Now they seem to be hanging out at opposite ends of the tank and I'm hoping Gina isn't mad at me to inflicting a tormenter on her previously solitary life.  The saga continues...

Update on Froggie alias Frogina or Gina for short...June 29

OK, sad news. It is with deep sadness that I must report Frank was discovered lifeless on the bottom of the tank. Gina was nearby and I feel she was sad to lose her new friend who had not been with us a week. I am once again perplexed and I wish I knew an African (Dwarf)Frog expert who could explain what caused his early demise.
Frank was hanging out near the filter with his nose out of the water for the last day or two. I am struggling with the guilt of having failed this helpless little creature. It is ironic because Gina our longtime Froggie lived in a much smaller bowl for the better part of a year with water I seldom changed. I was worried about contaminating our sink or toilet with salmonella so i let Froggie stew in his own juices way too long. i even tried to give him away to other families but they turned down the idea. I think the lockdown made me a little obsessive about Froggie. But we will probably be making another trip north to get another friend for Frogina.

Of course the thought has crossed my mind that she done him in but that is another story. Of course I am watching her closely.

There is a book on the care and raising of African Dwarf frogs on order. Until then I would be very glad to hear drom anyone who has experience with these little underwater frogs. chrisnfun@yahoo.com



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