Parental Artifact #4–Unfinished crafts

It’s not my usual practice to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and less so to butt in, but sometimes I make exceptions. So it happened, almost two years ago, that I was in line to check out at the co-op with my bi-weekly feed order, when I overheard a middle-aged woman talking with her friend, near the cash registers. She was animatedly discussing a hobby that she had recently taken up, and the great satisfaction that it was giving her. Stained glass, she was saying, gave her a creative outlet for making designs, and the colors and light just were so pretty to look at!

I had just returned from Los Angeles, where my brothers and I were starting to scale the mountain of worldly goods that my parents left upon their death. At the time, we were simply trying to figure out the lay of the land. Our explorations reached the back corner of the shelves in the garage, a land of boxes that had been labeled and tied shut with twine decades ago. One of the dozens of boxes was labeled “MMA Glass” and another was “MMA Stain glas lead”. These labels were puzzling to us, so we opened them, and the labels were accurate—one heavy box was dozens of sheets of colored glass, and the other heavy box was smaller chunks, some thick or patterned, and a good stock of lead for joining.

Not all memories lie exposed, on the surface, always visible. There’s stuff in your memory that you don’t know is there. Something—an object, a smell, the angle of the light on a winter day—can abruptly shake the crust off of a long-buried memory. Fragmentary and decayed, it is once more exposed to your consciousness. Like filling in the missing pieces of a shattered urn or partial fossil, you reconstruct the memory into a coherent whole. My oldest brother recollected, dimly, my dad making some things with glass. We all, eventually, remembered a mobile of glass and wire fish that hung in my dad’s office, though I had no idea my dad made it. We shrugged, talked of maybe donating the glass to a craft club, and continued our exploration.

Naturally, I was pretty excited to hear this stranger’s enthusiasm for stained glass as a craft. I strayed enough from my own character to butt into her conversation, and offer her a goodly supply of material, on the condition that its delivery would likely have to wait at least a year. She said she’d be able to give it a home, we exchanged names and phone numbers, and there things stood.

A few months later, both of my brothers were again at the parental home, working on the mountain of stuff, while I participated via a video link. My brothers had opened—possibly for the first time in over a decade—a steamer trunk and sorting through a hodgepodge of things. There were trivial souvenirs of travel that my parents always collected: plastic shopping bags from every country they’d been to, hotel bars of soap, “do not disturb” door tags in dozens of languages. There were children’s clothes from our younger days. There were some really nice shirts that my dad had bought during our travels, and seemingly never wore. There were some fabric art projects that my mom worked on, and one of these made my brothers quite interested.

What I could see over the video link was my brothers unfurling a large white cloth with some embroidery, but I couldn’t see what was embroidered. They were laughing and pointing and obviously trying to decipher something confusing, while I was just getting frustrated. Eventually, the whole thing got laid out, and they finally held the phone so I could see what they had discovered.

My mom had been working on a years-long embroidery project; it was to be a growth chart recording the progress of my brothers and me, done with much more artistry and craft than the traditional pencil markings on the kitchen doorway. Both of my elder brothers were there, with several entries, color coded to tell them apart. There was one entry for me, the youngest, and that was apparently it. There were no more entries.

My mom’s embroidery project ended soon after my birth. The last stitch was probably added in 1968. My dad had ordered the stained glass supplies, and set them aside, maybe a year later—along with the glass and some instructions, padding was provided by newspapers dated 1969. My mom was coping with a five year old, a three year old, and a baby. My dad had just started on the tenure track at the university. They had also just bought a house. My dad’s mother had died just before I was born, and his dad (who lived nearby) needed help adjusting to a very different life.

There’s only so much time in a day, and so many days in a week. I know that in my own life, even without children, hobbies have fallen by the wayside as I’ve gotten busy. As a kid and young adult, I happily experimented with lots of hobbies and crafts, and gained moderate proficiency in many. I enjoyed most of them and would probably have loved pursuing them, but the demands of life meant that I put most of them down and walked away. Perhaps in some parallel life I spend my leisure time kayaking, or weaving and knitting, or playing the organ, or flying, or climbing. In one of these lives, maybe I’d see the stained-glass lamp my dad bought the plans for, or I’d have grown up seeing more tapestries made by my mom. Maybe there would be other things, from pastimes they’d sampled but that I never knew about and will never know.

And so, after my most recent trip to Los Angeles, among the boxes that completely filled the bed and cab of my farm truck, were the box of “MMA Glass” and “MMA Stain glas lead”. I contacted the person I met at the co op a year earlier, and she was still interested in the supplies. Her hobby had bloomed, and was keeping her happy and busy. A week ago, she drove over to our place to pick up the boxes. I’m happy that the supplies will get used. Colored glass should not be wrapped in paper, tucked in a box, and buried in the back of some shelves in the darkest corner of a garage for half a century. It should be filling with sunlight and pleasing the eye. The hobbyist said she’d make a small piece for me, as a memory for my dad.

The embroidery sits, rolled up, in one of the boxes I have to unpack. None of us wants it, but none of us feels great throwing it away, though that will probably be its ultimate end.

It feels a little odd to be grateful for things not received, but that box of unused stained glass, and the blank spaces on the embroidery—they are actually very full. They are filled with games of catch and walks on the beach, with drives to the mountains, with an extra half hour of work with flash cards, with an extra bit of fussing on a birthday or when I was sick. No matter that I am not inheriting a fancy lamp or beautiful wall hanging. Mom and dad left me so much more.

 Parental Artifact #3–a waxed cotton raincoat.

It has been a dry, dry summer. For the first time ever, our usually reliable well and cistern failed us yesterday—or rather, I failed them and then they failed us. I was filling the bucks’ water tub with a hose, got distracted by moving some hay around, distracted again by some suspicious behavior from one of the bucks (he was fine), and then distracted again by a need to get the rest of the evening’s chores done. It was less than two hours later that I was reminded of the hose: no water came out of the tap in the house.

I’ve run the cistern dry a couple of times before. The pump out of the cistern (to all of the hoses and waterers and the house) is faster than the pump into the cistern from the well. Before, emptying the cistern took a full day or a full night. Also, once dry, our well has been generous enough that it could fill it back up pretty promptly. At the end of this long, dry summer, though, this is not the case. Last night, the well gave us a little bit, then stopped. A few hours later, it gave a little bit more, and then stopped. After four hours, the well still had not put enough into the cistern to make the pump turn on, so the dishes from dinner remained unwashed (as did I, going to bed). The usual anxieties that sing one to sleep on the farm were joined by anxiety about the well failing. When I checked on it at three o’clock in the morning, the pump from the well was still not going, and the level in the cistern hadn’t risen perceptibly.

Fifty years ago, my family lived in Dunedin, New Zealand, for a year. My dad, a biochemist at USC, arranged to take a sabbatical year at the University of Otago (I am quite sure that my mom’s interest in the botany of the Southern Hemisphere was not inconsequential in the decision to go there). My family has always been a family of hikers and outdoorsy types. My parents met each other in the Cal hiking club, and weekend hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains and beyond were the routine growing up. No surprise then, that we did a lot of hiking in New Zealand. I was only five at the time, and I wish I remembered more of it—I do remember fields of lupines, fantastic beaches, glaciers, rivers, sheep…and rain.

It rains a lot more in New Zealand’s South Island than it does in Southern California. I hardly ever remember hiking with more than a windbreaker growing up, but New Zealand called for rain gear. So my dad, apparently (I don’t remember any details) bought this waxed cotton raincoat. It wasn’t a super fancy thing, kind of standard for a farmer or hiker in the days before Gore Tex. I remember my dad wearing it and a very nice pair of hiking boots as we tramped around on the weekends, visiting places with delightful Maori names and beautiful sights.

We returned to Southern California, and continued hiking. Whether in the Santa Monicas, or Anza-Borrego, or in the Sierras, though, we were mainly fair-weather hikers. My mom didn’t like the cold and wet, so on the rare occasions when the weather was intemperate we would usually just go to a museum or shopping. A windbreaker was plenty, and I don’t recall seeing the waxed cotton raincoat again. It pretty much slipped from my memory, and settled into the depths of a steamer trunk in my parents’ closet. When my parents once again went hiking in the cold and rain—after we had moved out and they retired and vacationed in Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, and New Zealand—they brought with them up-to-date Gore-Tex and down.

When my brothers and I went through the contents of the closet last year, we were initially puzzled by the raincoat, but eventually remembered its story. The “made in NZ” tag helped. The Gore-Tex rain gear was more desirable, but I thought I could give good use to this raincoat. It’s nice to have a lightweight long rain coat in Oregon, and good to have something where it’s not an expensive tragedy if it catches on a bit of fence wire. Also, I’ve found that hay doesn’t stick to wet waxed cotton the way it does to nylon. Oddly, it fits me well, even though I am quite a bit taller and skinnier than my dad ever was.

So, the raincoat was hanging in the coatrack by the door when I went out to check on the cistern last night at three o’clock AM. We had been woken up by the blustery arrival of a wet and windy storm, and I thought I heard something blowing around unsecured. I figured I might as well go and check on things and give a look at the cistern while I’m up and around. The raincoat worked just fine at keeping me dry in the blowing rain. It was disappointing to see that the well still wasn’t filling the cistern. Fortunately, by morning’s light, the well had added enough to the cistern that I could fill the animals’ waterers and buckets and do the dishes from last night. I’ve been wearing the raincoat much of the day today. We’ve gotten well over an inch of rain, but the well is still barely keeping ahead of usage, and the cistern has only gained a few inches over the day. This long, dry summer is slow to loosen its grip.

The raincoat is probably going to serve me for just a few more seasons. Fifty-year-old lightweight waxed cotton is brittle and tears easily. Just from routine use, it has, shall we say, become more breathable. But it is still very useful, does the job that I ask of it without complaint, and reminds me of hiking with my dad. As a bonus, it allows me to daydream that I am that beau ideal of New Zealand farmers, Fred Dagg.

 Parental artifact #2 in a series—a 1 quart Thermos flask.

Sometimes, an inherited thing is just a thing. Most of the stuff that has just arrived in my house is encumbered by the weight of memory and sentiment to one degree or another. This Thermos flask, however, carries no obligation to be a symbol of my parents. It is itself.

I know it has quite a history. Some of that history is literally etched into it; on the bottom, scratched with a laboratory diamond pen used to mark glassware, my dad wrote “GOOD”. Thermos bottles break or get compromised, and they were an expensive thing for a grad student, so probably there was another one labeled “BAD” or the like, that is no longer with us. Some of this flask’s history is also found in the archives. I’ve seen pictures of my parents as a young couple, on excursions with the UC Hiking Club or friends, with that Thermos on the picnic table or at the beach or in the mountains.

However, almost none of this Thermos’ history lies in my personal experience. I knew it existed, but it stayed far up and away in the back of the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet—well out of the reach of the curious and nosy youngest son. I have very dim memories of it on early camping trips, and then…no more. For whatever reason, it just didn’t get used any more…even though it was still “GOOD.”

When my brothers and I were divvying up stuff in the kitchen, taking turns choosing this or that item, I opted for this flask and another Thermos, a nice carafe, similarly underused. It was an easy choice. Neither of my brothers likes hot beverages at all and neither had any sentimental attachments to them, so they went to me.

I drink a lot of tea. At home, the carafe gets used regularly because it keeps a full pot of tea nice and hot for half a day’s sipping. On the road, the large Thermos is good for a couple hundred miles of driving. It has seen a lot of good use. I have had to drive to LA and back to deal with my parents’ estate a few times, each day of the two-day drive is a big Thermos and two travel mugs of tea. I also drive all over Oregon on farm business; the drive to Salem for the Oregon State Fair last week was the big Thermos and a travel mug (with enough leftover to see me through unpacking). This Thermos is just a Thermos, a device for making the day slightly more tolerable and keeping my theic self from suffering the DT’s.

It would be easy for me to retroactively add a lot of sentiment to it; indeed, it would be pleasurable to do so, making the object all the more valuable and cherished, and making its every use more significant. I could happily invent the memory that it was tea from this Thermos, poured for me by my dad on a cold and sodden morning while camping, that led to my three-pot-a-day habit. But, that was not the case. My parents’ tea tastes tended towards Lipton, which is like homeopathic dishrag rinsings. But one time, while I was in graduate school, I was visiting home and my mom was sipping some quality lichee-scented black tea that she had been given. I was tired, it smelled compelling, I tried some, and I was pretty well hooked. I started with that, then Earl Grey, then Yunan, and now I have a tea drawer stocked with eight black teas and a few oolongs and greens and other stuff. That’s how I got hooked on tea, and it was my mom’s doing, but the Thermos was not involved.

I could also easily dream that this thermos is an emblem of our family camping trips. It’s in photos of my parents camping before my brothers and I were on the scene. So, why should it not have been there every winter when we would spend a week in Anza-Borrego State Park, or every summer jaunt in the Sierras or Redwoods, or each weekend hike in the Santa Monicas? It could have been an integral part of my family’s trips, which were so important in our life together. It would be with the Coleman stove, the lantern, the lineman’s knife and canteen cup and trenching tool from my dad’s army days— all of these were on every trip, and are now heavily laden with sentiment. However, this thermos was not there.

So, this thermos is just a thermos. It’s a very nice one, to be sure. It reminds me of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “One-Hoss Shay,” so well built it lasts a hundred years and outlives generations of owners. It’s most of the way there. Its vacuum has held for at least sixty years, and the tea I fill it with in Roseburg is still piping hot in Redding. Even though it doesn’t poke at my heart and and remind me of my parents, its quality and reliability is enough for me to give it some love. And, as I drive all over the country with it riding shotgun and pouring tea, it will slowly and inevitably develop a patina of memory and sentiment. Those memories will be mine. As for the thermos? It will still say on its bottom what it is: GOOD.

 Parental artifact #1 (this may be a series, based on things I have inherited from my parents’ estate, and the thoughts they elicit).

My mom was a big fan of the author Nevil Shute. This might have been because we lived in Australia for a year, and many of his novels are set in Australia and use the peculiarities of that country in the mid-20th century to drive their plots; or it might have been because he is simply a rather good novelist who plots and writes well, can spin an interesting romance, and can develop at least one thought-provoking idea per book. At any rate, she had acquired over the years a pretty complete collection of his works from library sales, garage sales, and very rarely even getting one new. Because the books were there when we were growing up, my brothers and I also have read a bunch of Shute’s works, and because they were special to mom, these books became things that carried a little more significance than random 75-cent paperbacks in terrible condition that came from a library sale.

So, it was not too surprising that when the time came to go through and divvy up all my parents’ books, the Shute books were more difficult to allocate than the Daphne Du Maurier or the Captain Hornblower books. We ended up trying to figure out who already had what books (everybody had “A Town Like Alice” and “On The Beach”, natch) and then trying to balance completism with having nice hardback editions etc. I was a bit unsentimental; for me, the main value of the books is that they are a good read, and less that it was an object that my mother owned, read once or twice, and put on a shelf. So I wasn’t put out when another brother got the only copy of “Beyond the Black Stump” that we’d seen. I pretty quickly found out that it was available, for free, from Fadedpage.com, a website that provides e-books of stuff that’s no longer under copyright in Canada; I downloaded the electrons, while the book stayed in California, and settled in to read a Shute novel that I had never read before.

“Beyond the Black Stump” is definitely a Shute novel. It has engineers, romance, airplanes, Australia, some adventure, and a pretty efficient style that makes it a good read. I was particularly interested in it because, unlike any other Shute novel, it also features rural Oregon. About a third of it is set in a fictitious town that is like La Grande or Union, out on the northeast side of the state, in 1955 (I live in rural Oregon, in roughly the opposite corner of the state, with many neighbors who ardently wish it were still 1955).

This isn’t a book review, so I’ll summarize the plot as boy (petroleum engineer, from Oregon) goes to outback Australia (“beyond the black stump” is slang for out beyond nowhere), meets girl (daughter of the owner of a vast station), they fall in love, and interesting complications ensue. A lot of the friction that makes the novel (and the relationship) interesting have to do with the differences between rural Oregon, only two generations removed from being on the wild frontier but still regarding itself as being frontier, and back-of-beyond Australia, still very much a wild frontier. This still has some relevance, as some of the psychopathologies of Roseburg and rural Oregon in general have to do with an ineradicable belief that living here makes you a rugged pioneer who stands on his own, rather than just an ordinary citizen who has been getting a weird, Oregon-specific tax benefit from the Federal government for their entire life.

The book is dated, though—and not just in the way that Australian Aborigines are depicted. There are aspects of the relationships between the love interests and between other folks in the book that just seem weird. Why should it be a scandal that she’s with that guy? Who really cares about what those two did years ago? Wait—he did what and is still accepted in society? And really, you lovebirds, you seem to be making things needlessly complicated.

I was thinking about how these things struck me as weird, and then I did some math. 1955, the lovebirds were almost 20 and almost 30, and I realized that these folks who were having relationship complications, but behaving completely normally for the time, were the same age as my parents!

This goes some way to explaining why my mom was a big fan of Shute; she probably didn’t read this until the 1980’s, when it could have had additional sentimental charm of reminding her of her younger years. With regard to my mom, though, the more interesting thing for me to think about was how much had changed. In 1955, when the book was set, and when she and my dad were in the very early stages of their relationship, there were plenty of rules about how a relationship should go and what was proper and acceptable and what was not. They may have bumped up against some of those rules (their parents didn’t particularly get along), but mostly they played by them. How did it look to her, then, in the early 1990’s when I became romantically involved with the love of my life, under quite different rules? She (and my dad) made no fuss about it, and seemed to be fine with how things went. I didn’t ask whether she felt like things were improper or wrong, and she was mum. I also don’t know whether she wished her relationship with dad had been more modern. I’ll never know for sure.

Ultimately, the relationship in the novel bumps into the problem of the lovebirds (and the lovebirds’ families) having some quite different values, perhaps stemming from their different ideas of “frontier” life. Those differences make a neat, happy ending for the central lovebirds impossible. However, one gets the sense that the outcome is a better ending for all concerned, and the story wraps up in a very satisfactory manner with at least a prospect of happiness for all. I’ll also note that, having played by the rules of their day, my parents stayed together their entire lives, over 50 years. Also, playing by the modern rules, I’m still madly in love with my sweetie.

Notes on the Gourse Lab reunion, August 2022–Part I

I recently attended a reunion of the lab in which I did my postgraduate work.  It’s provoked a bunch of thoughts—about scientific progress, about the paths people take through life, about mentorship, and about myself.  

Of these, it’s far and away the easiest to talk about science.  This fact was borne out again and again over the two days of short presentations by thirty years’ worth of grad students, technicians, post docs, and principals.  We all wanted to acknowledge our debts to each other and how important our advisors and peers were in our lives, and we all, every one, got choked up doing so.  Several people hastily moved to data slides after dissolving into tears on acknowledgements and were only able to compose themselves in company of dry facts.  Since one of the things I learned in grad school is to attack the easiest parts of a problem first—and they will be hard enough!—I will begin with science.  I swear I’ll do my best to make it more about humanism and less about jargon.  

My thesis advisor’s field of study is roughly three-quarters of a century old, depending upon exactly which set of experiments you chose as its initiation. This field—I’ll call it “molecular genetics”—analyses a whole cell on a molecular level.  It seeks to understand the interactions of thousands of genes and proteins and other molecules as the cell grows, or as it responds to its environment by modifying itself.  The preeminent model organism in this field, from the very beginning, has been the bacterium E. coli; this bacterium is afflicted by a virus, known as lambda, and sometimes it carries a spare bit of parasitic DNA that spreads itself from cell to cell, called “F factor.”  To say that these three have been intensely studied is an understatement; since the the first work on them in the late 1940’s, they have been the subject of sustained intensive thought and experiment by thousands of the smartest people in the world, and me.  One would think that a 10 micron cell and its two parasites, with some 3,500 genes, would have no secrets left after such attention.  One would be wrong.

Some of the genes and proteins in the E. coli cell are less important than others, and perform one small task which makes the cell a small amount more healthy under a limited set of circumstances.  Others are quite the opposite—they affect literally every single part of the cell, all the time, being responsible for the creation of every single component of the cell.  The activity of these central genes is understandably important to the cell, and over 35 years ago, my thesis advisor set out to study the control of their expression.  It was known that there was a molecule in the cell, given the jokey name “magic spot,” that affected their regulation under stress, but the details were murky; when I joined the lab 30 years ago, it was already an old problem, but seemed soluble.  

During the eight years I was in the lab, it became clear that magic spot was not absolutely essential for the regulation of these central genes.  In fact, my thesis is titled “Redundant Regulatory Regimes Render […] Regulation Remarkably Robust,” as I studied one of the alternative regulators of these central genes.  But magic spot was still there, and others in my cohort made progress in describing how it did its job; while magic spot may not have been necessary for regulation, they showed that it was capable of the task.  

Historians study the dead, and their continued efforts can paint ever-fuller pictures of their subjects in spite of the stillness of their tongues; the more time historians have had to dig into a dead person’s life, the longer the biography.  So it was with my fellow students and researchers in my advisor’s lab, studying the silent E. coli over decades.  They found details about the molecular interaction between magic spot and the protein at the center of the problem.  Then they found another factor, called “DksA”, that seemed to have a greater effect on that same protein than magic spot, and once again it seemed that magic spot was less relevant.  Then they found that DksA actually interacted with magic spot to have an even more dramatic regulatory effect.  The molecular interaction behind this regulation was completely different from the molecular interaction with magic spot by itself—yet the effect was qualitatively similar.  And so, while E. coli could no more speak about the details of its own history than a dead president, its biography grew ever thicker, and our understanding of the web of relationships between proteins and genes in the cell grew more detailed.  

Very recently, the people in my advisor’s lab made an even more interesting discovery.  We now know the complete DNA sequences of thousands of organisms.  Even better, if we know one gene from our super-detailed study of E. coli, we can look at these thousands of organisms and find similar genes, and test to see if they make similar proteins that do similar things.  So, people in my advisor’s lab looked for things similar to DksA—and found them.  In F factor.  And Lambda.  Where they had been for the whole history of molecular genetics, known and yet unknown: we were aware of their presence, but unaware of their role.  Like “Terra Incognita” in the maps of early explorers, these genes were labeled “unknown function” in the atlases of F factor and Lambda.

While DksA is a regulator of a centrally important process for the health of the cell, these similar proteins from F factor and lambda are detrimental to the cell.  Both F factor and lambda are parasites.  F factor utilizes cellular resources to spread itself from cell to cell, and lambda is a virus that can completely monopolize the machinery of the cell to make dozens of copies of itself and then explode the cell.  In a healthy bacterial cell, DksA interacts with magic spot to reduce expression of other genes to conserve energy during lean times.  The DksA relatives from F factor and Lambda look like DksA with magic spot already attached to it—and they reduce expression of other genes, not to save energy, but so that more energy can be spent on making more F factor or lambda viruses.  

So it is that the in the map of these long-studied organisms, another piece of “Terra Incognita” gets properly colored in; genes, known for decades but always described as “of unknown function” can finally be understood, because of decades of work on a tangentially related problem.  

This finding gives me a very warm feeling about the practice of science, even though I am no longer in this field at all (as a goat farmer I am in a very different and much more literal field).  I feel a connection, no matter how slight, to a dedicated quest for knowledge that has been ongoing since my dad was in high school.  I also feel some small pride in having had even a microscopic role in that effort.  

More strongly, I feel a reverential awe for the subject, an insignificant bacterium and its two parasites.  They seem so simple, the bread-and-butter of basic biology classes, and after 75 years of work they should be passé—yet, as Prokofiev noted, “there are still so many beautiful  things to say in C major.”   Indeed, the symposium’s closing remarks were equally about what had been found and what remains mysterious.  The study of these simple cells, like an inexhaustible mine, continues to reward hard work with philosophical treasure.  

—————

(I have omitted names, in an effort to center the process, rather than the persons; but in truth, the people are the creators of this story, and it is their intelligence, perceptiveness, and perseverance that have made this little portion of the map of life better known.  My advisor is Richard Gourse; he and his advisor, Masayasu Nomura, charted out the initial forays into this territory.  Wilma Ross has overseen much of the navigation through over 30 years of exploration, translating Rick’s directions to concrete action as well as plotting courses of her own; and of course, many students and post docs performed the hard labor of exploration, most notably Tamás Gaál, Kathy Josaitis, Melanie (Barker) Berkmen, Saumya Gopalkrishnan, Jonathan Jagodnik, and Rachel Salemi.  I have a strong and enduring affection for the field, obviously, but such gifts as I have are not in laboratory research, and it’s for the best that I labor elsewhere.)  

Wednesday wordage (slightly late) another neologism edition

 Shartcut:  a particularly awful, shoddy, egregious bit of avoiding doing the job right.  

Wednesday Wordage Neologism edition

 Fruckus: a noisy but meaningless skirmish or fight.  A portmanteau of fracas and ruckus.  Spontaneously uttered when asking your livestock guardian dogs what the heck they are doing wrassling with each other when they should be out watching over your goats.