All afternoon long the next door, not-too-close neighbor had been banging away with his gun, shooting at who the hell knows what, possibly having a grand old time in a manner that is so antithetical to me i can hardly imagine the motivation nor the gratification. I mean, think about it. Where the hell did all those bullets GO into????
Not the coyote, who he tries and tries to hunt hunt hunt and kill kill kill. The stable monogamous couple who kills no sheep nor chickens nor cause any trouble whatsoever. Possibly the meager surviving squirrels from the coyote appetite? I think not.
Or maybe the soft slow moving possum i met out in the compost the other night? No. Or the trees, standing and living, taking root from dropped seed, and then surviving, standing tall and making their way through drought of summer and frozen days of winter, communicating with elegant complexity with all of their kind?
More possibly. I mean, who are these fellow humans, who venture forth and plunder what they can? I have no answer, no considerations, nor any estimation of their ways , nor what it may be like to be them.
Oh, I had a father, who would come home from work, enraged, after bellowing like a bull at people in his business, then preen himself at my few visits, at how auspicious his powerful grasp of them was.
And I would sit in amazement, wondering from where he came. And he would tell me with such cheerfulness that at the end of work days, making a great deal of money and screaming at many people, whomever he could, in the process, and then feeling very fine about it indeed, he would get out his DDT in his spray bottle, and go about attacking evil invasive Dandelions. In his yard.
Yes, when he told me this, I kept to myself my sense of pathetic shock. That he would glean satisfaction from attacking and killing stationary plants, whose medicinal benefits both to his lawn and his person he had no interest in.
And later, when he procured for himself Hodgkins Lymphoma, and directed a lone sibling, of six, to tell noone, the sibling told all, of course, for what a ridiculous thing to set upon an offspring with whom you have bothered to develop neither bond nor meaning.
No, he who filled his world with DDT, whose half life exceeds so many things on earth it is shocking, far exceeding his own unprecedented odd life, his own odd ways of perpetuating rage and salacious death upon tiny living things.
It is he who in that strange way became one of my greatest teachers, by all the things he remained unable to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment