The Quickening
Walking along the bay, I can see schools of fish breaking the water, chased by some unknown aggressor. It is the quickening. Least that's what Calamity Jane (my wife) and I decided to call it. It's the end of fat summer and the beginning of the long dark passage through winter to the other side of light. Some won't make it. The grasshopper is still singing but the ants will surely turn him out soon as he comes around panhandling. Even in the children's story the merry, music-making, loafing grasshopper is put out to his fate.

I haven't read this story to my daughter because I'm not ready to tell her about the savagery of man (or ants--a metaphor for us). She'll learn soon enough.

The quick and the dead. As a little child, I remember sitting in church, freshly scrubbed, listening. The quick and the dead. To me, at that young age, it meant those who were fast enough to elude their pursuers were "quick;" those who couldn't wound up as highlights on Marlin Perkins' Wild Kingdom. It's the fly struggling in the web, the bird plucking the worm: the big bad wolf blow, blow, bloooooowing your house down. At my house, it's the garishly singing birds falling silent and the squirrels moaning plaintive pleas as the hawk swoops in, all business like a mob enforcer ready to exact the fealty of nature. It's the bigger kid taking your lunch money. It's the young cashier at the convenience store silently crying while taking my money.

What was troubling her? I suspect the same thing that troubles everyone at the margins: survival.

Used to be survival was easily defined. Either you had enough firewood to get you through the winter or you didn't. You had put up enough stores for winter or you were in trouble. No longer. Now, we get fresh fruit year round, we don't care where it comes from; grocery stores are supposed to have these things. We're silly billies. We can't face the fact that we are living in a construct of illusion: a house of cards. I've seen that house shake and rattle; I've seen people in a panic lose it over a bag of ice or a gallon of gas. I've seen the panic in their eyes when the bottled water is running out, the grocery store doesn't have what they want and the big storm is roaring in. Don't mind me folks; I'm just passin' through. I'm gonna climb in my hybrid and leave. Detroit (or really Madison Avenue) sold you these Hummers, Escalades, Navigators, Suburbans or (my favorite), Sequoias. Let them tell you how to find gas. You drank the Kool-Aide; you listened to the grasshopper singin' "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

I'm not unsympathetic (right schoolboy?) to your plight. I just don't see how you could be so wasteful. You've been sold a lemon by the boomers, a generation who were given everything and expected even more. They talked a good game when they were kids, marchin' and protesting. But they were co-opted. Integrated into Halliburton; seduced by material things. They now go to their dotage ostensibly thinking they changed the world when all they did was use it up. The same technology that propels me past the gas pump while you all wait has been around for a while, but the sexy, cool thing was speed, power, and (most importantly) comfort.

Everyone loves a good come-uppance on reality TV. No one is ready to admit they are due. Oh baby, we're due. I'm planting my winter garden. Used to be in times of war everyone planted a victory garden. Now we cut taxes and cluck at the TV while the numbers (not the pictures mind you--that would be inflammatory) of dead climb.

So I'm tilling and planting. Anyone want greens? Beets? Cabbage or lettuce? Don't come around here panhandling. I got a little one to protect now. Remember what I did to the moccasin. Let it be a warning.