Updike Farm

Here in Wolftown, rabbits [a]bound. Our dog, Taz -- an Aussie Shep mix with only two speeds: on and off -- chases them without much success. He's terribly quick, but they're just a step more agile. Still, every once in a while, he'll corner one and leave the results in the yard for me to discover when I get home. It's bad enough when it's just one, but occasionally he's dragged some newborns out of the warren and they lie there in a row like little brown shiny sticks of putty, barely alive, short little breaths just underscoring their [our] tenuous hold on life.

Last evening, Taz was concentrating on a something behind our stone chimney in the side yard (the only remnant of an old summer kitchen long since gone). I went to investigate and found a hole he had dug, inside of which lay a young kit on its side, head hidden under a clump of dirt, breathing shallowly. I shooed away Taz and then debated whether I should end the poor kit's misery. But with what? Brain her with a shovel? Bury her alive? Not willing to do any such thing, I decided to wait and to keep Taz away. Throughout the evening, I checked on her. When I went to bed, she was in the same position and still alive.

Next morning, I looked in the hole and the kit was still there, but now sitting on her haunches like the Sphinx, upright, eyes closed, motionless. I watched for a minute or so. No movement. I picked up a stick and gently prodded her. She was hard as stone and didn't respond. She must be dead, I thought. But how nobly dead! She had used her last energies to gather herself into an icon for the ages. Diminutive but every bit as proud as her Egyptian counterpart.

I turned and went to the shed and pulled out a shovel to dispose of the remains, but in the half-minute that I was gone, she had disappeared. Vanished. Either beamed up, or scampered away. Forbearance had worked; nature had decided on life. For the kit, and so far today, for me, too.

So I was thinking about this episode and wondering if I should record it. I thought, "hmm rabbit," maybe a good title using John Updike to show my literary creds. But I wasn't fully convinced until the ride in when I was listening the estimable Bob Edwards on XM who was interviewing memoirist Augesten Burroughs who mentioned John Updike in a riff about the writing craft. Well, that sealed it; that and the rabbits scampering across the farm by day and the fireflies lighting up the hollow behind it by night. Not a bad place to live here, the Updike Farm.

Life is a Cliche

I’ve often cited approvingly Andy Rooney’s metaphor for life: a roll of toilet paper that keeps going faster the closer it gets to its end. But it’s more a cliche rushing headlong toward its sea, buffeted by the rocks of days, sometimes dammed up by them, but then bursting through with unstoppable energy, racing and sometimes meandering through all the terrains of the world, from the mountaintop where its first waters emerged out of a still spring to the coastal plain below, its roar now quieted and its pace slowed, depositing into the delta all the nutrient rich detritus accumulated during its journey, yielding new life as it joins the great ocean beyond.

But seriously....

During the last several years (I’m now 54, a week away from 55), the days and weeks and months and years do indeed seem to roll by ever faster. It could be a function of working in a stimulating job, but more likely it’s the simple and profound fact that I’m embraced by a warm and loving family every day that I come home. That’s something many others do not have. Yes, I have experienced grief without depth (but who hasn’t, or won’t?), but when profiled against the utter misery and despair visited upon millions of people throughout the world, my life is beyond good, beyond anything I could have ever hoped for.

That gives me the luxury of contemplation, which as you would no doubt hear from my family if you were to ask, I do in great quantity. Sometimes, the wonder and the magic of life can literally take my breath away; moments of such spacious serenity and transcendent simple beauty that I just know, know, that I’ve tasted a tiny dollop of the nectar. In those moments, one understands how ill-equipped and unprepared we are as humans to fully grasp such boundless clearness without being blinded in all of our senses. There really aren’t words that describe what we would be blinded by, but blinded we would surely be. Our seven senses could not handle the data dump.

But getting a glimpse of that clarity is not just seeing it, or imagining it. One is it -- if for only a piercing, fleeting moment -- but enough to conclude that it is beyond real. My West Virginia forebears would go down to the railroad tracks and scoop up spilled coal for their fireplace. They didn’t have to see any cars or any locomotive to know why it was there. There was a track and there was coal along it. So, there must be a coal train.

A purge

No, not in the political sense as in Powell by Bush or CNN by Ahmadinejad, but as in Thunderstick by Fleet in anticipation of his screening colonoscopy. Tomorrow, after 24 hours without food, two doses of the emetic (I think they would call it that), many quarts of clear liguids, and God knows how many times on the throne, they'll be photographing my insides via a long tube with a tiny camera. I hope the business end doesn't come out my nose and that it doesn'f find anything suspicious. I'm assured by friends who have undergone the procedure that it is really nothing to be concerned about, but the imagination reels. So reel it in, Thunderstick, and you'll be much better.

Like ants filling a river

On this my first post, I'm reminded of a movie long ago called The Hellstrom Chronicle in which it showed a scene of army ants plundering the countryside. They marched with such force and number that they could pull from a tree a giant lizard who had vainly tried to escape. Swarming over the poor critter, they ate out his eyeballs and tore into his innards, the herculean power of each individual ant multiplied by the millions of her companions doing the exact same thing. Then, moving the dead lizard with their gazillion pincers they forged ahead, filling a river with their bodies until their carcasses created a passable bridge. On they went, disappearing over the horizon, their lifeless lizard lurching above and leaving a swath of destruction about...hmmm, maybe five yards wide.

Kind of like blogging. And here's the question: are you an ant, a lizard, or a bystander?