Thursday, May 27, 2010

Life's Lessons #1

One of the most widespread fallacies in our society is that waiting is a wholly unskilled function. A mere nuisance, like intestinal gas, that requires no more training or aptitude than breathing or defecation. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Consider the new-born infant. It wakes up. It screams. Its mother immediately feeds it or cleans its bottom or both. Waiting has no meaning for it. It is inexperienced. But not for long, because pretty soon its mother has either dropped dead from exhaustion or discovered that attention postponed for a few minutes will not prove fatal. The wise baby will learn at the same time that these solitary moments can be put to good use by eating small objects off the floor or teasing the cat. This is the first lesson in waiting: that life offers periods of uncommitted time as well as myriad resources to fill them.

A lamentable number of people do not progress beyond this. These are the children in the supermarket who trigger grapefruit avalanches, the young persons who attack mailboxes, the junior executives who pace and fret in airports, the angry citizens who enliven traffic jams through repeated and prolonged use of the automobile horn.

The second lesson, that it is a good idea to sort out those methods of passing time that will result in gastric ulceration or jail time from those with a more benign impact on later life, may be learned soon after the first or may be postponed for years, depending on the aptitude of the individual and the quality of instruction available. Most of us do achieve this level of competence eventually. We are the ones who never leave home without a pocket full of reading material or a bag of knitting or a tape player that will teach us French in our idle moments. But we need these crutches. We are fidgety without them.

It is the rare one among us who successfully completes the third lesson, that resources can be found within us to ease the passage of uncommitted time. Those who have mastered this lesson are usually old, but rare instances exist of younger adepts. These are the people you see occasionally, without books or puzzles, who are seated quietly somewhere looking through the fuss of their surroundings at some gracious and satisfying world that they have summoned out of their experience. Their faces are peaceful. They have achieved satori.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Fawn

One year the road crews got a deal on brilliant white marble chips and used them to disguise the potholes and washouts along the road as soon as the mud stabilized in the spring. The result was that our lumpy little road suddenly became a fairy tale lane aglitter with sparkling gems and alight from within. One sunny afternoon after this dazzling transformation and before the dairy farm’s industry dulled its luster, I was driving down one of these never never stretches, when I spotted a dark blob silhouetted up ahead in the middle of the lambent road.

A pox upon these slovenly spreaders,” I thought as I approached. And then I thought the blob moved. I slowed down in case my mind was suddenly gone. And then the blob changed shape. I slowed some more. And then the blob resolved itself into a deer standing in the middle of the road. Now I was down to a dead crawl. I was almost upon her.

She twitched and dithered and finally soared into the woods next to the road. I was nearly at the spot where she had been, but there was still a blob. A very small blob, which finally staggered to its tiny wobbly feet and staggered in the direction its mother had gone.

I stopped the car on top of the blob site and got out to look. There was a pretty good sized berm beside the road here, beyond which was a deep ditch. Then the hillside rose steeply into the trees. There was no sign of the deer. There was also no sign of the fawn. I couldn’t believe the little creature could have made it up onto the berm much less down into the ditch and up the other side. I walked up and down the road peering into the ditch, looking behind bushes, parting the grass. Nothing. I was standing on top of the berm about to throw in the towel. I looked down to find a foothold. There was a big leaf there. I lifted it up and there was the infant, folded neatly into a tiny speckled mound, like an exotic dessert, absolutely motionless except for its long velvety nose. I studied it carefully, its little legs folded up like carpenters rulers, its velvety ears pressed close to its neck, its long, soft nose moving almost imperceptibly, just as it was in utero.

Jim would love this, I thought. It was only a quarter mile back to the house. I backed away and studied the trees, the bushes, a mossy rock, so I could come right back here, and then went home.

We returned in minutes. I had no trouble finding the trees, the bushes, the mossy rock, but I could not find the fawn. I couldn’t believe the little fellow would have sprung to his feet and scampered off so soon. The both of us walked up and down the road looking into the ditch. Then I saw my big leaf. I bent double and looked under it. It was still there, still immobile, with its waffly little nose still probing its small world.

Now, I have read about cryptic coloration allowing moths and lizards to blend into their surroundings. I have seen photographs of zebras under trees and leopards in them, but it is my belief that this went far beyond that. This was not optical trickery. This was pure witchcraft.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Theology

So there he was, on an idle afternoon, around 4.7 billion years ago, The Supreme Being, bored. Nothing to look at and supper a long way off, picking his cosmic nose and kicking at empty space, wishing, wishing that there was just a little bit of matter to mess with. “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride,” his mother had said in that dismissive tone of voice that made it clear that she was not going to tell him what a beggar was, or a horse either for that matter. Then all of a sudden it came to him that he was The Supreme Being and he could do anything he wanted. He could make a beggar to play with and it would be whatever he wanted it to be. Abruptly his mind cleared and he thought and thought about what a beggar should be – so many possibilities – he would try a couple of ideas and see if he liked them, but first things first.

Let there be light!” he cried, and clapped his hands so hard that a spark flew out and grew and grew, spinning and spinning. Then it started breaking up into lots of lesser sparks and he watched entranced as they spun around like a huge pizza, although he had no idea what a pizza was at the time, growing and sparkling until he was surrounded with them.

After a billion or so years this grew tedious, and he didn’t think this is what a beggar was anyway, although he was pretty sure this was matter and should be fun one way or another. So he took a closer look and found that there were little bits of dust between the sparks. He gave one a little poke and it flew apart. “Oooh!” he cried in childish delight and did it again. But after another billion years or so this too grew tedious, so he kicked back and looked at his little universe while he thought what to do next.

He whiled away another billion years perfecting volcanoes and oceans and continental drift. He launched a few comets and set up some magnetic anomalies, lit off some supernovas and watched some stars collapse.

Then idly, he stirred up a little ocean and noticed that there was some stuff there that he hadn’t ordered. Cross, now, he thought it would be amusing to make some trilobites to eat this stuff. “Let there be trilobites!” he cried, and there they were crawling around the bottom of the sea, lapping down the presumptuous crud. Then he added some mollusks and worms and brachiopods and sponges and jawless fishes and some nice oozy plants, some jellyfish for pretty and some echinoderms for fun, all the while looking for something that might be a beggar. But nothing looked just right, so he just sat back and watched it all for a while, and before you knew it another billion years had passed.

Crossly, he wiped out most of his little creatures to make room for new ones that might be beggars. Then he noticed that there was nothing on dry land. Lots more space to make things on so he started filling up both land and sea. He made bugs and toads and cycads and mosses and starfish and lungfish and sharks and kelps. But none of them were beggars, so he wiped them out again and again and replaced them with new ones. Magnolias and lizards and spiders and tree ferns and clams and salamanders and plesiosaurs and brachiosaurs and tyrannosaurs and mosquitos and rats.

He liked the rats so he got rid of a bunch of stuff and made some bears and bats and seals and tigers and antelopes and rabbits and horses (at last a horse) and weasels and mastodons and monkeys. This was beginning to look more and more like a beggar. So he made lots of monkeys and lemurs and apes and lorises and marmosets and baboons. Finally, in a whimsical moment, he made a big naked ape with an oversized head and watched while it multiplied and played with matches and worshipped itself and wiped out his other creations. This would have annoyed him a lot more than it did were it not that he knew at last that he had his beggar. So he just sat back and watched, and laughed and laughed at the idea that this preposterous creature should think that it looked like him.

He had completely lost track of time when he heard his Mother’s voice shouting “What have you done? I leave you alone for a little while in a nice clean void and look at the mess you’ve made! You clean that up right now and come in for supper!” And so he turned for one last look at his funny little ape strutting and swaggering, and regretfully raised his hand…