Don't Panic! You can still get your monthly Create fix. Just follow the h2g2 Post's monthly challenges. You can procrastinate your writing exercises the same as usual. You just have to listen to more Editorial waffle first.

Some years ago, when I lived in Philadelphia, my little dog Ariel had a veterinary emergency. Somehow he'd managed to get a needle stuck in the back of his tongue, poor thing. He'd probably licked it up from between the floorboards of our old house while foraging for a stray treat. Of course, I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that his mouth hurt and he wouldn't let me look at it. I needed professional help, so I bundled my 14 pounds of fluff into the car and drove over to the University of Pennsylvania's emergency veterinary clinic. Amenities like that are why I liked living in Philadelphia.

The vet clinic was full of competent young people in lab coats. One of them asked me to put the dog on the nice, clean stainless-steel table, which I did. Ariel, however, didn't like standing on stainless steel – and he didn't trust those lab coats. So he backed up a bit, until he was touching me.

Shih Tzus are not what they call 'protective dogs'. Unlike our current 5-pound wonder, Lola the Shorkie, who will threaten all comers before demanding pets of the human ones, Ariel expected you to protect him. It was his birthright as a Tibetan temple dog and companion of the Buddha. Call it transcendental agreement or just me being a pushover, but when Ariel backed up, I instinctively put my arms around him.

Whereupon he tucked up all four legs, until he was completely off the table and I was holding him again.

The vet laughed. I laughed. Ariel looked smug and charming at the same time, as only a Shih Tzu can manage to do. (Okay, maybe a pug, too.) The rest of the exam went fine. They knocked him out and got the needle. We were sent home with antibiotics. Ariel lived for 13 years and wore a groove in my heart.

Ariel's action on the veterinarian's table has stayed with me – an image I will never lose. To me, it's a visual and tactile memory that shows me something. A demonstration of interactive communication across species, a way the world can work if we let it. What some might call synergy. Anyway, whenever I feel like I'm in a similar situation, the incident with Ariel pops into my head. I think of it as a kind of metaphor memory.

I have a lot of little metaphors like that in my memory, like the time when I was about six years old and my mother asked me to straighten out the bits of tangled string in her kitchen drawer. That task created a metaphor for me, one about teasing out meaning from the noise of information.

Another metaphor was provided by a kindergarten class I taught once. I wanted them to work on a jigsaw puzzle. I poured the pieces onto the table. Each child competitively snatched up as many pieces as they could and guarded them jealously. They looked at me with expectation.

'What do we do now?' they asked.

I laughed. 'You build the puzzle.'

'How?'

'You have to put the pieces together. With each other.' The look on the faces of those five-year-olds was a study in dawning comprehension. That's what I mean by a metaphor memory.

Do you have a metaphor memory you can tell us about? Are you willing to let us benefit from your experience? You'll have to give us a little bit of context so that we can see it in our own minds.

Let us know what the universe has taught you. It might be a valuable piece of somebody else's puzzle.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

29.05.23 Front Page

Back Issue Page