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Event #138: Visual Triggers
LAST WEEK's EDITION |
I spend a great deal of time on the back porch. There's no railing, for the deck slams into a thirty-foot slope. My more-than-significant other has put a garden there. I don't look down at the flowers, the flowers look down at me. Bees buzz around trying to find better seats. They're never happy where they are. Every so often a hummingbird flies in, checks out the entertainment, and leaves.
And I'm Oedipus. Or Hamlet. Or, more likely, some Neil Simon character -- here merely to amuse Mother Nature's theatre-going public.
Those are the easy days. Rougher ones include wrenching inner challenges to deeply held beliefs. It's Paul the Chipmunk who has been the catalyst for these self-doubts.
Paul is too much fun. At first skittish at the sound of me (he doesn't see very well), it wasn't long before I was simply an obstacle. He'd stop, sniff, and nimbly negotiate my big toe. In a few days it dawned on me that most of his activities involved rummaging for food, so I balled up a section of bran muffin and threw it at him. He nudged it with nose, packaged it in his mouth, and scurried away. Paul was happy.
The next morning he started bugging me. Practically perched on my foot, he looked up and waited. I assembled another snack, bent over -- and before I could give it to him he jumped up and knocked it out of my hand. I guess he thought I was a tree whistling in the wind. Oh, I'm giving myself too much credit. I was nothing more than a branch.
In the afternoon it was an apple on the veranda. I saw Paul scrounging around in the garden, trying to balance his diet. I cut off a piece of the fruit and placed it on the far end of the patio. Eventually he found it, snapped it in his mouth, sat down, settled it in his paws, and started chomping away as if he were tackling a slice of watermelon. What a show. I was being entertained for a change.
Apples not having a thick rind, Paul seemed a bit puzzled when his repast began to collapse. He started to fold it over.
A rat shot out from under a rock. I grabbed a shovel and tried to beat its head in, but the thing was too fast for me. All I ended up doing was putting a dent in the shovel.And scaring the hell out of Paul. Did I ever feel bad. He was probably quivering in a hole somewhere, saying to himself over and over, "Boy, you can't trust those walking trees."
But for me it was time for philosophical inquiry. " ... Here I am, feeding and caring for Paul -- yet as soon as I see a rat I want to bash its head in. Hey, we're talking about Paul's cousin! Maybe they know each other, hang out together. Who knows. It's just that wailing on one and not the other is like seeing a beautiful dog, petting it, getting it a dog biscuit -- and then having some smelly mutt show up and taking a baseball bat and ..."
Heretofore secure in my ultra-liberal political beliefs ... was I becoming a rodent racist? (To my horror, I find I even have very strong opinions about mice. Less intent on genocide, I'm more of a separatist. Live and let live -- just so they don't move in.)
Where I lived before, it was so much easier. You killed anything with four legs that didn't meow or bark. Now I'm forced to discriminate. If the tail is cute, it lives.
Soon, no doubt, I'll be forced to pensively wrestle with other moral dilemmas -- bumblebees vs. yellow jackets, for example.
Ahhh, for the simple life of the city!
