Atlanta once burned. Blame Sherman. Now it floods and God’s getting the blame. So CNN said. But someone, or some thing, is always to blame for everything.
I’m blaming a white plastic fork for my problem last year. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s what happened.
I used to keep a ’96 Chevy Blazer in Atlanta. It was really my daughter’s, not mine, just a hand-me-down. I’d bought it on a credit card as a wedding present (I say credit card because the wedding had pillaged my bank account). See, in weddings a father’s role is to “sit down, shut up and shell out.” Have you learned that yet? You will!
She’d moved up to a Benz, another hand-me-down from her mother. The Blazer suited me. I felt like Clyde without Bonnie behind the blackened windows. Anonymity has its own rewards. Furthermore, door dings didn’t keep me awake. In fact, it infuriated the insolent swine who swore revenge, and the Blazer became a vintage classic. But it did cause some consternation in my family.
They’d make snide comments like, “Have you no pride?” Or “I’m gonna laugh when the door finally falls off on Peachtree Street.” At least the valets expected no tip from a driver of a junk heap. By the way, it’s possible to drive vehicles a long time with the aid of bungee cords and duck tape. And the door never once fell off…I prayed a lot in those days.
Back to the episode. It was a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon. I’d arrived in Atlanta with a powerful hunger gnawing in my stomach. I’d spent a fortune for a large to-go of veggies and fried chicken from OK Café. Its aroma excited me beyond human comprehension, and I swooned in anticipation of the feast as I headed back to my office.
Starvation is a trickster. I got out of the car with the food, leaving my cell, wallet, keys and plastic fork in it. The office keys, too. The door shut, locked. Uh oh (well, that’s not REALLY what I said). My life flashed before my eyes. I saw the ambulance picking this desiccated, emaciated body from the parking lot, exclaiming, “Poor fellow…died of hunger for want of a plastic fork.”
Starving brings murder, mayhem, blame, things like that. But reality set in, my food sitting on the door stoop, getting cold. You see, my fork was inside the Blazer. I cursed the incompetent design engineer, the manufacturer, the inept line crew in Detroit and the dealer. They all had a hand in my dilemma, but blame won’t pay the rent, so I considered other options.
No luck. No money, no cell, no fork. The food got colder. I became delirious, irrational. Starving men are can’t be held accountable for their actions. Hunger drove me to more urgent solutions.
Ah, the back flair window, it was loose. Could I get a stick in the crack? No luck. Pull a little harder, no luck. Harder. The crack widened, I could see the fork. Harder, harder yet.
POW…like an explosion the window cracked into a thousand black pieces. Frantically, I shoved the stick in and hit the auto lock, success at last. In a crazed frenzy I reached in, grabbed the fork---never mind the other things--- and attacked my cold cuisine.
Later I assessed the results of my impetuous actions. Where did the blame go? That’s the dilemma. Who, or what, was to blame for this $238 mistake? Me? My hunger? God (others have for far less!)? The fork that mocked me? Blame had to go somewhere. But where?
The human brain is so constructed that all things must have a proximate cause, and as a consequence require a plausible conclusion. Any shrink will tell you that sanity cannot abide an un-reconciled mystery.
The epilogue to this ugly event was fitting. We gave the Blazer to a charity, Feed the Hungry Foundation, for a healthy tax deduction, a fitting conclusion to assuage my guilt and my family’s embarrassment. Circle closed. But was it? I think yes. You see, now there will always be a fork in the future of this Blazer…somebody else’s problem!
This blame game is serious business, and if we look deep enough, there will always be a Judas goat somewhere that can take the blame.
Take my word for it!
Bud Hearn
September 24, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
No Box for Equivocation
Her shrill voice over the telephone was insistent, “Fill in the empty boxes, sign the return and fax it back if you want to avoid jail time. The last drop at the post office is in fifteen minutes, I’m tired and seriously considering murder…yours!”
It was my favorite accountant, gone berserk, on this, the last day of tax filings for procrastinators like me. I knew it’d happen, but then again I wasn’t worried…she says the same things every year. Plus her office is 15 miles away, and in Atlanta, 15 miles is an eternity!
I’ve finally put her “in a box” and know her moods. However, given closer proximity, and a sufficient quantity of alcohol, she just might make good on that threat. Only fools push women to such extremes! Which is why legislators are, or should be, considering a total ban on alcohol sales to women on the eve of tax-filing day.
Procrastination won’t make tax problems go away, it just prolongs the inevitable. The inevitable? Why, having to declare “under penalties of perjury” that the boxes on your return, and the name you have signed are true and accurate. Which recalls Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” Believe me, the IRS has a different view of truth than you do!
This year, the boxes on our business returns, line 22, “Ordinary business income (loss)”, contained either a 0 or a loss bracket. I could finally declare the truth with absolute impunity.
Fortunately for me alcohol sales were not banned, and I sat comfortably, sipping on a very tall mood-enhancer, thinking of the boxes I’d filled in over the years. And wondering what boxes I’d been placed in by others. It’s dangerous to think along these lines. Sooner or later philosophy enters and convolutes reason. But reason saved me tonight when the phone rang. A friend’s voice muttered sadly, “Hey, man, got a minute? I’ve got a dilemma.”
What’s new, I thought, he always has a dilemma, especially where money and women are concerned. “OK, Bobby, which is it, money or women?” Silence. “That hurt, man, has she already called you?” he said. I now had the answer, but asked for more. “Which ‘her’ is it this time?” I questioned. “New one, you don’t know her. It’s different this time.” His certitude was suspect.
“Different, huh? Care to explain?” I laughed… love travails of others are always funny, unless they’re mine! “I’ll try, long story short,” he said. “Things went well for a while, we were perfect for each other.” I interjected, “Define ‘a while’ and ‘perfect,’ please… these concepts confuse me.” He hated my directness.
“OK, so not like THAT long, just a week, and I probably misused the word ‘perfect,’ since nobody’s exactly perfect.” The truth inched closer. I listened. “She’s forced my back to the wall, putting me in a box, demanding I declare my intentions. Said I had to decide…Now!” I rolled my eyes, and asked, “Well, Bobby, just what are your intentions?” More silence. The question stunned him.
Finally he spoke, “It’s like the tax return I signed today, where all the boxes had to be checked, yes or no, truth not lies, or else. No wiggle room…hell, maybe she’s an accountant. You think?” Enhancing my enhancer, I asked a stupid question, “Well, did you bother to ask her ‘line of work’?” He answered just as stupidly, “In time, man, I was getting around to that. First things first.” Not hard to see why Bobby had dilemmas with women.
I answered, “Seems simple, like the tax return, just check the box that applies. If she’s OK, check that box. If not, then the other box. Like you said, ‘no wiggle room,’ let the chips fall where they may.”
He lamented, “Easy to say, hard to do. Problem is, I just don’t know. Relationships are organic, transitional, so how is it possible to ‘box’ them once and for all? There should be a box that says ‘Maybe,’ that allows for change.” Creative, but improbable.
The discourse dragged on until nothing was left of my enhancer but dregs, which was pretty much how I saw Bobby’s life ending up with this “new one.” The boy just had a hard time facing up to the truth, whatever that is in such a world of subjectivity. We finally said goodbye. Nothing was solved.
That night I dreamed about the tax returns and relationships. Somewhere in the dream a ball and chain appeared. I took that as a warning, vowing to neither procrastinate nor perjure myself in the future on either.
As for Bobby, who can say? Perhaps he checked the correct box and this “new one” will be his last one ~ then, maybe he can lose my phone number!
Bud Hearn
September 17, 2009
It was my favorite accountant, gone berserk, on this, the last day of tax filings for procrastinators like me. I knew it’d happen, but then again I wasn’t worried…she says the same things every year. Plus her office is 15 miles away, and in Atlanta, 15 miles is an eternity!
I’ve finally put her “in a box” and know her moods. However, given closer proximity, and a sufficient quantity of alcohol, she just might make good on that threat. Only fools push women to such extremes! Which is why legislators are, or should be, considering a total ban on alcohol sales to women on the eve of tax-filing day.
Procrastination won’t make tax problems go away, it just prolongs the inevitable. The inevitable? Why, having to declare “under penalties of perjury” that the boxes on your return, and the name you have signed are true and accurate. Which recalls Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” Believe me, the IRS has a different view of truth than you do!
This year, the boxes on our business returns, line 22, “Ordinary business income (loss)”, contained either a 0 or a loss bracket. I could finally declare the truth with absolute impunity.
Fortunately for me alcohol sales were not banned, and I sat comfortably, sipping on a very tall mood-enhancer, thinking of the boxes I’d filled in over the years. And wondering what boxes I’d been placed in by others. It’s dangerous to think along these lines. Sooner or later philosophy enters and convolutes reason. But reason saved me tonight when the phone rang. A friend’s voice muttered sadly, “Hey, man, got a minute? I’ve got a dilemma.”
What’s new, I thought, he always has a dilemma, especially where money and women are concerned. “OK, Bobby, which is it, money or women?” Silence. “That hurt, man, has she already called you?” he said. I now had the answer, but asked for more. “Which ‘her’ is it this time?” I questioned. “New one, you don’t know her. It’s different this time.” His certitude was suspect.
“Different, huh? Care to explain?” I laughed… love travails of others are always funny, unless they’re mine! “I’ll try, long story short,” he said. “Things went well for a while, we were perfect for each other.” I interjected, “Define ‘a while’ and ‘perfect,’ please… these concepts confuse me.” He hated my directness.
“OK, so not like THAT long, just a week, and I probably misused the word ‘perfect,’ since nobody’s exactly perfect.” The truth inched closer. I listened. “She’s forced my back to the wall, putting me in a box, demanding I declare my intentions. Said I had to decide…Now!” I rolled my eyes, and asked, “Well, Bobby, just what are your intentions?” More silence. The question stunned him.
Finally he spoke, “It’s like the tax return I signed today, where all the boxes had to be checked, yes or no, truth not lies, or else. No wiggle room…hell, maybe she’s an accountant. You think?” Enhancing my enhancer, I asked a stupid question, “Well, did you bother to ask her ‘line of work’?” He answered just as stupidly, “In time, man, I was getting around to that. First things first.” Not hard to see why Bobby had dilemmas with women.
I answered, “Seems simple, like the tax return, just check the box that applies. If she’s OK, check that box. If not, then the other box. Like you said, ‘no wiggle room,’ let the chips fall where they may.”
He lamented, “Easy to say, hard to do. Problem is, I just don’t know. Relationships are organic, transitional, so how is it possible to ‘box’ them once and for all? There should be a box that says ‘Maybe,’ that allows for change.” Creative, but improbable.
The discourse dragged on until nothing was left of my enhancer but dregs, which was pretty much how I saw Bobby’s life ending up with this “new one.” The boy just had a hard time facing up to the truth, whatever that is in such a world of subjectivity. We finally said goodbye. Nothing was solved.
That night I dreamed about the tax returns and relationships. Somewhere in the dream a ball and chain appeared. I took that as a warning, vowing to neither procrastinate nor perjure myself in the future on either.
As for Bobby, who can say? Perhaps he checked the correct box and this “new one” will be his last one ~ then, maybe he can lose my phone number!
Bud Hearn
September 17, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
A Place to Be
“We all jus’ prisoners of the earth, Mistah Bud, mostly jus’ trying to get along in the place where we’re at. Now, I ain’t saying this here is the best place they is anywhere on this earth, but it’s where I be now, and I make do.”
The man who said these words was Felix Johnson, a huge black man that worked on my grandfather’s farm. He was not a philosopher, just a laborer who sweated with me in the sweltering summer peanut picking season. It was his response to a question I had asked, not so much for wisdom but in an attempt to break the silence that hung heavy between us that day.
It was late August, 1963, the summer of my senior year at the university. We were sitting together in the dust, drinking the last of the sweet iced tea, sucking the sugar off of the ice cubes. Our backs rested upon the peanut combine while the setting sun cast a shadowed orange haze over the bone-dry landscape. The stripped field lay silent in the dusty brown windrows of desiccated peanut vines. Nothing moved. Our day’s work done.
I was 21, contemplating my life’s options—he was 35, living his. I had asked, “Felix, do you think people know what they want out of life, the place they want to be?” He spat. A long arc of brown snuff juice sliced the air, and the powdery dust swelled and rose where it landed, then settled again. He said, “Well, I reckon folks think they know what they wants, but it seems to me they generally don’t know. They jus’ trying to find how to get on in the place where they’re at.” He sat motionless, statuesque.
We worked together for another couple of weeks until the last peanut had been picked. We cleaned the equipment, oiled and greased its bearings and rollers, replaced its missing roller tines and stored it for the winter in the barn. Felix returned to his regular farm chores, and I returned to my place in Athens to conclude what would be the final year of my “higher” education. Different lives, different places, but a common fate of making the most of the respective places where we found ourselves at the time. What choice did we have?
Felix was named after my grandfather. He lived alone “on the place” in one of the many tenant houses scattered around the large farm. It was built in the late 1880’s and lay down a dark, sandy lane in a grove of water oaks. In the yard of his place “free-range” chickens scratched for seeds and grubs in the sandy loam. Two dogs usually lay languid in their hollowed-out dusty places beneath the porch.
Nothing remains in this place today, the forest having reclaimed its own. Except for a few scraps of wood, moldy and rotten, lying in the shadow of a stone chimney, still standing stately and blackened from fires of the past, little intimates that life once existed here. Strange, how it remains in my memory, with Felix standing stoic, iconic, on his porch when I arrived to pick him up, and where he retreated when I had returned him at day’s end. He had no wheels, just an antique Ford tractor, the red markings nearly rusted from the fenders. Occasionally I would see him riding the old mule…he made do.
My places changed often in those ambitious years after college and the past was subsumed by the present. On a visit “home” for Thanksgiving a few years later I learned that Felix had found an affinity for strong drink and had been killed in a knife fight in one of the bars down in “the quarters.” These obscure places were winked-at by the local law, realizing that farm life often got boring and there needed to be places to find relief. Unfortunately, Felix chose the wrong place at the wrong time, or the wrong woman, his choices sending him to his final resting place.
A lot has happened since those days. I’ve often thought about this “sense of place”-- a place, or places-- where we can “be” who and what we are at the time. Often we ourselves, unknowingly, define a place to others, even as others, like a favorite bank teller, or mechanic, or waitress, define their own environs to us. The old, the familiar, the comfortable speak to a fundamental need of some sense of permanence in a transient, changing and reinventing world.
Places often define us. We adapt, their milieu molding us subliminally in ways we never anticipated or realized. Once in my hometown church I was accosted by two elderly ladies. “We hardly recognized you since you were ‘out of place’. Your place was the back right, and you were in the front left.” I thanked them for reminding me of this lapse of memory but assured them that God had approved of the move. “Praise the Lord,” they said in unison. Some things never change.
It seems a fair statement that humans like to complete circles, reconcile them in their minds so as to move on in life. In September, 2004, some 41 years later, the last of our family farm was sold to another farmer. It was once over 11,000 acres and had been in our family since the late 1880’s, having been acquired partially by lottery and by private sale. Imagine, farming such a spread with mules and men…my great grandpa must have wanted a job mighty bad! Yet five generations were nurtured and fed by this farm. It seemed a sacrilege to have sold it.
Later that year, in November, my mother was laid to rest in the family plot in the city cemetery. The day was cold as the mourners huddled together closely with the casket flower sprays under canopy of the small, white tent over the grave. The farewell service was short, what more can be said at a grave? The crowd dispersed and left at a respectful pace…graves are no place to linger for long. Another circle had been completed, and everyone there knew there’d be more circles concluded in that place soon. The family retreated to the Methodist church for the remainder of casseroles and ham and fried chicken the “church ladies” had generously prepared. They would soon be off to their own places. I left the food and the family and took a final drive to close a circle of my own.
I eased the car off of the still-dirt road into the edge of a field that was no longer ours. It was the same field Felix and I had sat in on that hot August day, 1963. I wandered into that deserted plot, the dust swirling with every step, leaving a gray, powdery haze atop the smooth, shiny leather of my city shoes. Eerie, I thought. Nothing had changed in 41 years. It lay silently, just as it had in my youth, except for one thing: Ghosts of the past, of former days in that very place, were still there.
Slowly I stepped further into that field, strangely out of place in a blue funeral suit, anticipating something unknown. The composting brown stubble of another year’s peanut harvest was scattered about and littered the field. It issued forth a rank stench like mold and mildew in its decomposition. Small birds gleaned the peanut remnants. When startled, they flew up wildly into the wind, soared a few feet and lit again. Memories of another time began to live again in that place. As in my youth, I picked up and flung to nowhere small pebbles of limestone chips and assorted round stones from a Paleolithic age.
The American Indians have a saying that one’s ghost remains restless and present until the person is buried properly. A funeral was necessary here this afternoon.
But there were no visible graves there, only the sameness of the place lying fallow in the wind and heat and cold, waiting for the return of the mechanical torture of the plow and combine. That place rested now, but in a few months it would again be alive with green shoots of another year’s crop. Another family would toil, sweat, be nurtured and fed by the miracle of that dust upon which I walked. And walked for one last and final time.
I had come here for a conclusion, a reconciliation of an episode in my youth. As I strolled from that field a chipped arrowhead of flint lay exposed, chiseled by a Creek Indian ages ago. It rested peacefully, undisturbed for years, in its own place among the dust. I stooped, retrieved it and rubbed it on my pants. It reflected the late afternoon sunlight, brilliantly exposing another man’s efforts…a man who had also nurtured and fed a family in this place in a time so long ago. It was out of place in my hand, so I tossed it back where I found it. Grave robbery is not my occupation.
Whose field is this, I asked aloud to the wind? It whispered, “Why, it’s every-man’s field for a time, yours as well as theirs, a usufruct to everyone who are and have been prisoners of the earth.”
Leaving that place I crossed the short, barbed wire fence back into the road’s edge. I glanced over my shoulder one last time. On the far edge of that forlorn field they stood, Felix and the Indian, returning my glance. What could I do but smile and wave? I did. The field smiled back as the wind swirled the dust, and as evanescent as they appeared, their ghosts faded forever into the dark woods of another place. They were finally free to move on, and so was I. A memory had been re-lived and a circle had closed.
Some memories of my youth found peace that day in that place. Yet there were more fields to walk, and a few more ghosts to bury while time was still available. But in my heart I knew that the dust of another place was ultimately in my future…but not for now.
Driving away I thought, as prisoners of the earth, we have little choice but to move on, yet with the imperative of contributing something, even as small as sweat or an arrowhead, to the places we find ourselves while we can. While we can.
Bud Hearn
September 10, 2009
The man who said these words was Felix Johnson, a huge black man that worked on my grandfather’s farm. He was not a philosopher, just a laborer who sweated with me in the sweltering summer peanut picking season. It was his response to a question I had asked, not so much for wisdom but in an attempt to break the silence that hung heavy between us that day.
It was late August, 1963, the summer of my senior year at the university. We were sitting together in the dust, drinking the last of the sweet iced tea, sucking the sugar off of the ice cubes. Our backs rested upon the peanut combine while the setting sun cast a shadowed orange haze over the bone-dry landscape. The stripped field lay silent in the dusty brown windrows of desiccated peanut vines. Nothing moved. Our day’s work done.
I was 21, contemplating my life’s options—he was 35, living his. I had asked, “Felix, do you think people know what they want out of life, the place they want to be?” He spat. A long arc of brown snuff juice sliced the air, and the powdery dust swelled and rose where it landed, then settled again. He said, “Well, I reckon folks think they know what they wants, but it seems to me they generally don’t know. They jus’ trying to find how to get on in the place where they’re at.” He sat motionless, statuesque.
We worked together for another couple of weeks until the last peanut had been picked. We cleaned the equipment, oiled and greased its bearings and rollers, replaced its missing roller tines and stored it for the winter in the barn. Felix returned to his regular farm chores, and I returned to my place in Athens to conclude what would be the final year of my “higher” education. Different lives, different places, but a common fate of making the most of the respective places where we found ourselves at the time. What choice did we have?
Felix was named after my grandfather. He lived alone “on the place” in one of the many tenant houses scattered around the large farm. It was built in the late 1880’s and lay down a dark, sandy lane in a grove of water oaks. In the yard of his place “free-range” chickens scratched for seeds and grubs in the sandy loam. Two dogs usually lay languid in their hollowed-out dusty places beneath the porch.
Nothing remains in this place today, the forest having reclaimed its own. Except for a few scraps of wood, moldy and rotten, lying in the shadow of a stone chimney, still standing stately and blackened from fires of the past, little intimates that life once existed here. Strange, how it remains in my memory, with Felix standing stoic, iconic, on his porch when I arrived to pick him up, and where he retreated when I had returned him at day’s end. He had no wheels, just an antique Ford tractor, the red markings nearly rusted from the fenders. Occasionally I would see him riding the old mule…he made do.
My places changed often in those ambitious years after college and the past was subsumed by the present. On a visit “home” for Thanksgiving a few years later I learned that Felix had found an affinity for strong drink and had been killed in a knife fight in one of the bars down in “the quarters.” These obscure places were winked-at by the local law, realizing that farm life often got boring and there needed to be places to find relief. Unfortunately, Felix chose the wrong place at the wrong time, or the wrong woman, his choices sending him to his final resting place.
A lot has happened since those days. I’ve often thought about this “sense of place”-- a place, or places-- where we can “be” who and what we are at the time. Often we ourselves, unknowingly, define a place to others, even as others, like a favorite bank teller, or mechanic, or waitress, define their own environs to us. The old, the familiar, the comfortable speak to a fundamental need of some sense of permanence in a transient, changing and reinventing world.
Places often define us. We adapt, their milieu molding us subliminally in ways we never anticipated or realized. Once in my hometown church I was accosted by two elderly ladies. “We hardly recognized you since you were ‘out of place’. Your place was the back right, and you were in the front left.” I thanked them for reminding me of this lapse of memory but assured them that God had approved of the move. “Praise the Lord,” they said in unison. Some things never change.
It seems a fair statement that humans like to complete circles, reconcile them in their minds so as to move on in life. In September, 2004, some 41 years later, the last of our family farm was sold to another farmer. It was once over 11,000 acres and had been in our family since the late 1880’s, having been acquired partially by lottery and by private sale. Imagine, farming such a spread with mules and men…my great grandpa must have wanted a job mighty bad! Yet five generations were nurtured and fed by this farm. It seemed a sacrilege to have sold it.
Later that year, in November, my mother was laid to rest in the family plot in the city cemetery. The day was cold as the mourners huddled together closely with the casket flower sprays under canopy of the small, white tent over the grave. The farewell service was short, what more can be said at a grave? The crowd dispersed and left at a respectful pace…graves are no place to linger for long. Another circle had been completed, and everyone there knew there’d be more circles concluded in that place soon. The family retreated to the Methodist church for the remainder of casseroles and ham and fried chicken the “church ladies” had generously prepared. They would soon be off to their own places. I left the food and the family and took a final drive to close a circle of my own.
I eased the car off of the still-dirt road into the edge of a field that was no longer ours. It was the same field Felix and I had sat in on that hot August day, 1963. I wandered into that deserted plot, the dust swirling with every step, leaving a gray, powdery haze atop the smooth, shiny leather of my city shoes. Eerie, I thought. Nothing had changed in 41 years. It lay silently, just as it had in my youth, except for one thing: Ghosts of the past, of former days in that very place, were still there.
Slowly I stepped further into that field, strangely out of place in a blue funeral suit, anticipating something unknown. The composting brown stubble of another year’s peanut harvest was scattered about and littered the field. It issued forth a rank stench like mold and mildew in its decomposition. Small birds gleaned the peanut remnants. When startled, they flew up wildly into the wind, soared a few feet and lit again. Memories of another time began to live again in that place. As in my youth, I picked up and flung to nowhere small pebbles of limestone chips and assorted round stones from a Paleolithic age.
The American Indians have a saying that one’s ghost remains restless and present until the person is buried properly. A funeral was necessary here this afternoon.
But there were no visible graves there, only the sameness of the place lying fallow in the wind and heat and cold, waiting for the return of the mechanical torture of the plow and combine. That place rested now, but in a few months it would again be alive with green shoots of another year’s crop. Another family would toil, sweat, be nurtured and fed by the miracle of that dust upon which I walked. And walked for one last and final time.
I had come here for a conclusion, a reconciliation of an episode in my youth. As I strolled from that field a chipped arrowhead of flint lay exposed, chiseled by a Creek Indian ages ago. It rested peacefully, undisturbed for years, in its own place among the dust. I stooped, retrieved it and rubbed it on my pants. It reflected the late afternoon sunlight, brilliantly exposing another man’s efforts…a man who had also nurtured and fed a family in this place in a time so long ago. It was out of place in my hand, so I tossed it back where I found it. Grave robbery is not my occupation.
Whose field is this, I asked aloud to the wind? It whispered, “Why, it’s every-man’s field for a time, yours as well as theirs, a usufruct to everyone who are and have been prisoners of the earth.”
Leaving that place I crossed the short, barbed wire fence back into the road’s edge. I glanced over my shoulder one last time. On the far edge of that forlorn field they stood, Felix and the Indian, returning my glance. What could I do but smile and wave? I did. The field smiled back as the wind swirled the dust, and as evanescent as they appeared, their ghosts faded forever into the dark woods of another place. They were finally free to move on, and so was I. A memory had been re-lived and a circle had closed.
Some memories of my youth found peace that day in that place. Yet there were more fields to walk, and a few more ghosts to bury while time was still available. But in my heart I knew that the dust of another place was ultimately in my future…but not for now.
Driving away I thought, as prisoners of the earth, we have little choice but to move on, yet with the imperative of contributing something, even as small as sweat or an arrowhead, to the places we find ourselves while we can. While we can.
Bud Hearn
September 10, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Plundering in the Garden
Conscience is a peculiar thing…some have one, others don’t. Have you noticed?
I’ve noticed that the deer who invade my rose garden have no conscience. They sneak into the island gardens at midnight and munch on the tender leaves of the rose bushes. Anything with a conscience would take only what’s necessary, not overindulge, leaving the roses shivering with empty, spindly branches. The “Thanks” I get? Piles of scat!
Roses are quite charming in moonlight. But then again a lot of things are appealing in the moonlight, a fact no one would deny. Things that are dreary in daylight take on a romantic aura and set in motion endorphins that push the envelope. It’s particularly true among moonstruck youth. I’m guessing the deer in my yard are young, and, like their human counterparts, are full of mischief, fearless and living on the edge of a dare with an insatiable appetite. Good thing they don’t have cars!
Remedies for the rose pillage are few. Worthless panaceas promise much, but deliver little. An excellent method is to leave a human scent glistening upon the plant; but unfortunately there were too many bushes for my nightly run. Spraying with a sulfur-water compound is a close second in the homeopathic realm. The deer do a taste-test on the bitter leaves, recoil in a maddening dance, and bound off to the neighbor’s yard.
Since I have not succeeded in loving my neighbors as myself and shared this medicinal magic, sometimes my own conscience condemns me. The most permanent method of ridding these midnight marauders is with a .270 calibre Remington, a 150 grain silver point bullet with ballistics of 4,000 ft/sec. But that is an extreme measure on a genteel island. And heartless to boot!
It’s not easy to make sense of the thoughts and intents of conscience. A poem I read today shed some light on motives. Paul, a poet-farmer, had a problem with the deer eating his pears. He averred that the problem was not conscience, but hunger, writing, “…(it) starts in hunger, but suddenly need goes to frenzy and sheer plunder…this delirium…the instinct that draws them after dark into trespass…”.
Deer, like some people, have no conscience, only hunger. To warn either of them of the rewards of evil that lie in wait is useless. It’s like giving a teenage boy a six pack and keys to the car, and admonishing him to drive slowly and stay out of trouble. Good luck. Even God learned better than to tell a woman not to do something!
Another poet, Ogden Nash, who once heard unspeakable words while in a moonlight swoon, sums it up pretty well, “If one wants to live in peace on this planet, they will need a clear conscience, or no conscience at all.” Oh, what a steep price for peace!
We’ve been sorting through worthless remedies, searching for ways to assuage our national conscience. We’ve found about the same results as my rose garden exploration. Our hunger for more, more, more has abated, which is probably a good thing... especially since there is no more low-hanging fruit to be picked.
We should all be more careful what we nibble on…especially in other people’s gardens!
Bud Hearn
September 3, 2009
I’ve noticed that the deer who invade my rose garden have no conscience. They sneak into the island gardens at midnight and munch on the tender leaves of the rose bushes. Anything with a conscience would take only what’s necessary, not overindulge, leaving the roses shivering with empty, spindly branches. The “Thanks” I get? Piles of scat!
Roses are quite charming in moonlight. But then again a lot of things are appealing in the moonlight, a fact no one would deny. Things that are dreary in daylight take on a romantic aura and set in motion endorphins that push the envelope. It’s particularly true among moonstruck youth. I’m guessing the deer in my yard are young, and, like their human counterparts, are full of mischief, fearless and living on the edge of a dare with an insatiable appetite. Good thing they don’t have cars!
Remedies for the rose pillage are few. Worthless panaceas promise much, but deliver little. An excellent method is to leave a human scent glistening upon the plant; but unfortunately there were too many bushes for my nightly run. Spraying with a sulfur-water compound is a close second in the homeopathic realm. The deer do a taste-test on the bitter leaves, recoil in a maddening dance, and bound off to the neighbor’s yard.
Since I have not succeeded in loving my neighbors as myself and shared this medicinal magic, sometimes my own conscience condemns me. The most permanent method of ridding these midnight marauders is with a .270 calibre Remington, a 150 grain silver point bullet with ballistics of 4,000 ft/sec. But that is an extreme measure on a genteel island. And heartless to boot!
It’s not easy to make sense of the thoughts and intents of conscience. A poem I read today shed some light on motives. Paul, a poet-farmer, had a problem with the deer eating his pears. He averred that the problem was not conscience, but hunger, writing, “…(it) starts in hunger, but suddenly need goes to frenzy and sheer plunder…this delirium…the instinct that draws them after dark into trespass…”.
Deer, like some people, have no conscience, only hunger. To warn either of them of the rewards of evil that lie in wait is useless. It’s like giving a teenage boy a six pack and keys to the car, and admonishing him to drive slowly and stay out of trouble. Good luck. Even God learned better than to tell a woman not to do something!
Another poet, Ogden Nash, who once heard unspeakable words while in a moonlight swoon, sums it up pretty well, “If one wants to live in peace on this planet, they will need a clear conscience, or no conscience at all.” Oh, what a steep price for peace!
We’ve been sorting through worthless remedies, searching for ways to assuage our national conscience. We’ve found about the same results as my rose garden exploration. Our hunger for more, more, more has abated, which is probably a good thing... especially since there is no more low-hanging fruit to be picked.
We should all be more careful what we nibble on…especially in other people’s gardens!
Bud Hearn
September 3, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)