Fox Dreams

I saw a fox once at a game park designed to instruct folk on the habits and lifestyles of the wildlife that used to be there before the highway came through. The fox was in a large cage with an illustrated placard in front describing what it ate and what it did in the winter. There were some beavers nearby with their own placards, and caribou and a black bear. All these creatures were separated from each other by a chain link fence, and from the viewing public by a moat. There were a few trees in the cage and bushes and rocks and a den carefully designed by a wildlife biologist to simulate a home the fox might once have chosen for itself. It had even been given a companion to share the den with. Everything was provided.

The fox was at the back of the cage when I saw her, pacing along the chain link fence on a well-worn path as she must once have done in some woodland, stopping from time to time to sniff at a rabbit run or scratch under a fallen tree that might yield a plump vole. Always wary, watchful for the many dangers she shared her home with, lynx, wolves, dogs, hunters.

She would scamper along a hedgerow today on the lookout for nests of partridges or pheasants that might harbor an egg or a chick for supper. At the end of the hedgerow is an open field. The fox hunkers down, hidden by brambles, and surveys the vista for a while, sampling the perfumed summer air with its freight of damp grass and fallen leaves. Finding nothing amiss she lopes off across it to a copse beyond, where there is a stream. Safe again in the undergrowth, she slows her pace, stops for a drink, and finally seeks out the cool, musty darkness beneath a familiar stump to rest. Tomorrow she will go up the wooded hill on the other side of the valley.

Then that terrifying day, a moment’s inattention or a single wrong decision, and the trap was sprung. Struggling and snapping in the net, strong hands bundled her into a truck. Terrified and confused by the sharp smells, loud noises, she crouched in her dark cell until she was brought at last to this place where she can live a long comfortable life with her assigned companion without danger, worries, or care. Raw meat and vitamin supplements arrive on schedule twice a day and fresh clean water dribbles constantly into the concrete basin near her warm, dry den where her companion is sleeping.

Such a lucky fox. So why does she spend her days pacing back and forth along the chain link fence and her nights dreaming of voles?

Stream of Consciousness

There was a small Post-It on the ground next to my car in the parking lot.  I nearly stepped on it when I got out of my car.  It was a bit dirty because somebody else had stepped on it before I got there.  I leaned over so I could see what it said.  “You are awesome,” it said.  If somebody had given me a PostIt telling me I was awesome I would have it cast in Lucite and stuck to the fridge with a magnet.  Or at the very least enshrined in my wallet where I could bathe in its glory two or three times a day.  Who could so carelessly throw such a priceless artifact on the ground for strangers to step on?
Maybe the doting parent of some child who had received 80% on a spelling test had rewarded the unwilling scholar with this little yellow attaboy and was even now inside the grocery story buying sweets to reinforce this appreciation.
It was an odd day anyway, full of surprises, starting early in the morning when I heard a tumult out in the pond and discovered that the source was a family of otters that was guzzling down fishes at a great rate. This explained two observations that had piqued my curiosity: first that the muskrats that had been much in evidence all summer had suddenly vanished, and second that I had never seen a fish in the pond larger than a credit card.  I stood out there in the dewy grass in my pajamas watching my visitors porpoising through the cattails and squabbling with each other behind the shrubbery until they finally oozed off over the far bank and vanished down toward the creek.
On the other hand, it might have been the child who left this little billet doux for its mother, stuck to the coffee pot, say, or the bathroom mirror.  Someplace where she was sure to find it before she got into the car and discovered that this same child had left a half gallon of butterscotch ripple ice cream on its side on the back seat of the car two or three days ago under a towel and forgotten it and now it had melted and escaped its cardboard confines and what had not been absorbed by the foam padding of the seat had bonded to the velour upholstery in a rapidly discoloring pad about the size of any bottom that might ever seek to reside there, an error that the child just discovered this morning when it went out to look for its bicycle helmet and noticed the smell.  That would explain why the note had been thrown to the ground right next to the rear door of some vehicle.  It might also explain why it had been stepped on.
Then on the way home I passed by that place at the top of Audet’s hill where they used to sell really nice corn, but I hadn’t seen their corn sign up in years.  They seemed to have given up edibles entirely in favor of chrysanthemums which I have no great need of.  But now there was the corn sign again, so I stopped in and got some.  And some beets since I was there. And then on my way out through the thousand chrysanthemums I noticed an enclave of peonies.  Always on the lookout for peonies that are not pink I had a quick look to see what there was and by miraculous good fortune there were several Karl Rosenfelds described on the internet (which does not lie) as “deep crimson.” So in one serendipitous visit I got 2 fine, red peonies and a compelling reason to clear the nettles out of the far end of the flower bed.  Not to mention a plate of corn, which, to be honest, was a bit disappointing.
But then it might have been delivered with a smirk by somebody who had carefully noted the progress of another family member through an entropy storm during which the participant had tripped over the dog, flinging spaghetti over one whole quadrant of the kitchen, then slipping on a meatball and falling into the table causing a cascade of tossed salad, chocolate milk, and merlot along with a scatter of small items like action figures, Tabasco bottles, spoons and such, then while windmilling for balance, still with a firm grip on the once full plate of spaghetti, depositing tomato sauce in colorful streaks on the ceiling, fridge, and remaining walls before finally regaining a solid upright position.  Surely such a performance would deserve at least a PostIt note.
And when I finally did get home and got a chance to look through the great wodge of mail that had been stuffed into my mailbox with such force that I had to winkle it out one envelope at a time until there was finally enough slack to move a catalog, there was an actual letter.  While it is certainly true that my memory is not what it once was, I can clearly remember those distant times when getting a letter was, if not routine, then at least unremarkable.  Yet there I was down there in the Shoreham Post Office lobby with a slithering armload of catalogs and demands for money from a dozen or two non-profits looking down in astonishment at an actual letter that some distant person had actually written to me and then put into an envelope and paid 44¢ to mail.  It gave me an odd feeling of time travel.
I like to think, though, that this was a note left by somebody for their lover, stuck to the wrapping of a small box or a nice plant and that this little scrap fell off while they were giggling together there in the parking lot, their arms around each other right there on the painted stripe between the cars.

Why I Write

The therapeutic value of writing takes several forms.

First there is the actual connection of a pen with paper. A fountain pen is best for this, and a nice smooth heavy vellum. You can lose yourself in this process, the troubles of the world falling away as the ink flows onto the paper and finally forms the loops and squiggles that convey “Worcestershire Sauce.” For best effect the W should be a tangle of swirls and eddies with a trailing banner that extends halfway across the line. It is a proud concept and should be rendered with elegance and dignity. It should lift the spirits.

For commonplace things such as “eggs” and “shoelaces,” simple script will do, but done slowly, feeling the almost imperceptible hiss of the pen as it forms the uprights and descenders. A short letter to your old auntie who barely knows what email is, bless her, should occupy about a third of your mind with thinking of things to say about the weather and your cousins, and the rest of it with the sensual pleasure of covering a nice piece of mauve paper with pleasing patterns of spikes and loops. It is a Zen-like process and a tonic to the soul.

Second there is the purgative effect of loosing a well-deserved blast of scathing ill-humor at the phone company, or the newspaper, about unsatisfactory service or the moronic or unscrupulous actions of some public servant. A really good head of steam can be developed if both can be demonstrated. Such compositions can have a number of positive effects. It is a good idea somewhere in your letter to make some reference to Myrmidons or Horatio at the bridge or the Augean Stables so as to let the buggers know that you are a person to be reckoned with. You will therefore probably have to brush up on your classics in preparation for the project and this in itself will broaden your mind. In rare cases you may even achieve redress for your grievances, but don’t count on it unless you have solid grounds for legal action and have made this clear in your letter. In any case simply putting a stamp on such a document and dropping it in the mail is a proven way to lower your blood pressure up to 20 points.

Third, writing things down enforces a rigor of thought and logic that is often lacking in speech. For example, in 1994 the Appalling Mr. Bush spoke thus: “Mars is essentially in the same orbit...Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.” Would the Pretender to the Throne actually have said this if he were writing it all down? Surely not, not even He, who later correctly observed, “Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.”

And finally there is the alchemical property of writing that can transform your personal crises into comic opera featuring airborne cream pies, hilarious pratfalls, and tumbling clowns. You may start your piece overwhelmed by the tragedy of your life, tears coursing down your wrinkled cheeks, steeped in the knowledge that your life is effectively over and nothing remains but this, your suicide note.

So you set the cup of hemlock down on your desk, blow your nose and start to compose your final jeremiad. By the time you get to the part where a family of skunks had moved into your wrecked car before the tow truck could even get there, a wry smile has crept across your puffy red face.

And when you reach the part about how your faithless lover nearly brained himself by tripping over his damned stereo system and falling face down in a heap of his precious bloody Guy Lombardo disks, breaking a good half of them, and his reptilian nose to boot, you are beginning to feel downright perky. And before you know it you notice you are aching for a cup of tea, so you pour the hemlock into a potted fern, go out for a quart of milk and by the time you get back you realize you needed a new car anyway, and what could you possibly have seen in that jerk? And you should have fixed that step last year. So you stow your tearstained outpouring under a pile of magazines and check what’s playing at the CinePlex.