My Education in Fictions

The purpose of my education is to haunt me with half-remembered crap.

I was trying to think of how I might have a conversation with different people. 

I looked at this teapot

Painting by a greatgrandmother (not mine), teapot
inherited from dead grandmother (also not mine)
bowl belongs to my son.

and thought "I could tell them about blue herons...then I proceeded to think things about herons that are not true. They are fictions. One expects that of fictions--that they be lies. But my errors of thought ran deeper than that.

It was PELICANS! Not herons.

Voila! Thar she blows! I had misattributed the iconography. 

It's the pelican of the Middle Ages who pierced his* breast in order to feed blood to the poor chicks, trapped as they are after hatching in a world of inevitable starving doom. 

Or maybe the pelican killed her young in a fit of pique

(Medea! Poison Dresses, Dragons! I have to say: that one inoculated me against love stories.)

as I was saying: a fit of pique and she pecked them to death then pierced her breast in later remorse. The blood thus brought forth, falling on the dead chicks, brought them back to life.

As for those different people, it was their good fortune not to be in my company.

*Yeah, this is interesting.