Normal Town

I used to live in Normaltown. In fact, I lived on Normal Avenue, in a house that dated from the 19th century and was owned by a woman whose avarice was the only quality that exceeded her vanity. She bilked me out of about a thousand dollars in rent, in the end, and I endured much there. Normaltown meant having half the floor devoted to a woman who got her 12 year old son only when his father was in prison, so I kept hoping that he would go straight. This child loved to roll a skateboard across the wooden porch in front to make my dog bark, and he would pound on my front window, when he thought I wasn't home, to torture my dog. It meant a cranky man upstairs who could only have downward thrusting sex with his old lady.

We should not dwell too often among the normal, for they are a nasty group, as I learned. They were, however, peppered with generations that sported faces of normality past. There was a grandmother nearby who was called Goody. Her grandchildren were famous, and she was sweet -- adopting neighborhood strays. I cannot imagine her having to confront the blind, indifferent killer of AIDS when it struck down one of her beloveds, and I do not wish to.

The letter carrier violated the Sabbath?

 My colleagues there, in Athens, were pretty normal, too. They were a collation rather than collection of hipsters and haircuts that could be cowed fairly easily, but they drove down knowledge as if it were a secret lover or a conquest. Honestly, I had a feeling that at any moment one of them would give another a swirlie. Nevertheless, they had wit enough, betimes, especially in service to cruelty. They were, as I say, collated, as they were each indexed, marked at the corners and arrayed orthogonally. Each had feet planted against the root of the middle class, and the attitudes and angles each particular one assumed from that base simply made a fuzzy orange.

Beside a cliff made of kudzu, or an ocean wave of kudzu stopped for a moment while you're looking, only to crash over house, road, car, and stream as soon as you look away, inflicts a sort of reality on the landscape. REM's first album had come out, and people around the country were wondering what the vines on the back of "Murmur" were. Whatever the intention of the band or art director on the album, the effect I got of the design was that there was a suffocation in the South. All during that time, I agreed with the theme. It was a very Harry Crews point of view -- this idea that something essential, or essentially wicked, was being starved of breath beneath what was quaintly termed southern culture. It was fashionable to wonder what southern culture would be in a few years, too, since we were already hip to the K-Marting of our land and the malls of the city. I regard such talk as blather now.

What I was feeling, anyway, was intimidation. The bigness of the inexorable is always present. It is never easy to shake, either. If the kudzu doesn't shake your confidence, then the river might. The small thing that, unattended, takes on its own way and dwarfs all your work is real in a way that eternal law is real.

I was also feeling the smallness of Normaltown. The expectation that of course you would scam your renters, if you could was normal. I knew it then, and the years have simply increased the font. In the Bronx, the buffet steakhouses had plaques up with lists of rules about how far away people had to stand from one another, how many pockets could be on their coats, etc., all because a buffet was of course a thing to scam. The phone company has online bill paying, of course so that they could close all their regional offices and make the mailed-in bills due at offices as far from the customer as possible so as to increase late fees. They made the online bill pay instructions small and hard to follow of course to trip up older customers because it's normal to maximize "profits" in late fees.

What's WRONG with me, if I don't learn to rip off every company I can? I should sign up for the free six months and then change to the next company after that. It's normal.

I am not better than the normal. In fact, their cars are not broken and dangerous. They do not worry about surviving until tomorrow for the paycheck as much as I do. I may be too smart to have an adjustable rate mortgage, but I also have no mortgage at all. My decade of not having to worry about every day's totals has never come, and it never will, because I do not have the normal preoccupation every day of finding a way to screw up and over. It is not normal to wake up and hear grinding from a disappeared ball joint.

I do not like Normaltown and its mania. When we were short of money recently, I sold my 24k gold class ring. I needed $100, and so I asked for it. The pawn broker agreed in a flash. Gold fixed at $1,800 an ounce. How weird was I being? Well, to even blame myself for not having gotten the maximum is to admit that I was seeking a profit, that I was buying and selling and that the trafficking in misery and memory is legitimate. I do not. I do not accept that normal.

I wish, before I had moved away, that I had planted kudzu in the backyard.

Fly Larvae!

"He showed concernment for his soul. Some things
In his experience were hopeful. He
Would sit and watch the wind knocking a tree
And praise this countryside our Lord has made.
. . . though a thirst
For loving shook him like a snake, he durst
Not entertain much hope of his estate
In heaven. Once we saw him sitting late
Behind his attic window by a light
That guttered on his Bible; through that night
He meditated terror, and he seemed
Beyond advice or reason. . .
. . . In the latter part of May
He cut his throat. And though the coroner
Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir
Palsied our village. At Jehovah's nod
Satan seemed more let loose amongst us." -- Robert Lowell, "After the Surprising Conversions" 1946

Robert Lowell is one of those poets with very few friends and very many enemies, and that's at least partly due to the fact that there are several editions of Robert Lowell. There is Robert Lowell the agrarian (above) of New England, Robert Lowell the diffident yankee, Robert Lowell the insane person, Robert Lowell the confessional, and Robert Lowell the noisome political actor. That's a lot for one poor madman to bear. It's even more for one bundle of poetic skill to have to voice. Me? I pick and choose. I kind of like his snarky poems about other poets, despite the poet, and I somewhat like the pretending stridency of the early stuff.

What I really like, though, is the madness that has an unchanging essence. It is a very American form that did not quite mature with our century.

I quoted a long stretch above because of it is a subtle butterfly net. It purports to be a poem written by one of Jonathan Edwards's deacons reporting after a visit from the great man. This deacon reports the score board: the saved soul of the dissipate or indifferent. However, it then goes on, like a physician discussing a disease of the soul, and notes how the patient was lost to hereditary and environmental conditions. It ends by noting that the entire village begins to have a rash of suicides, and the bass gorges itself on the spawn of the stream.

First, this is A-OK with me, because the evangelical movement continues along the path described here. A successful meeting results in X souls saved. I have seen a weekly service at a school populated by Christian students have an alter call as a regular feature. Further, the ministers exclaim at each meeting that the top priority for the students is to save their classmates by introducing them to the Gospel. Later, the speakers are ranked on how many were saved.

(I used to be upset that these folks assumed that anyone in the U.S. had not heard the Gospel. However, my students, who attend church every week, do not recognize Gospel quotations -- even ones I consider most famous, like "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last," or "Judge not, lest ye be judged," or "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Now, my complaint is that the ones who are supposed to "introduce" the others to the Gospel are unlikely to have read one of them still.)

However, the poem is only consciously about the underlying problems of evangelical preaching. By speaking of this figure powerless to stop his village from killing itself, completely unequipped to deal with his crisis, Lowell gets at despair itself and the call to repentance. When we convince people that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God, it gets pretty hard to convince them that forgiveness is available. Some people will never believe in their own guilt, but more will never believe in their forgiveness.

Each pleasure or admiration will call to mind some way of falling short. It took the exceptionally radical (and I think toxic) view of perseverance of the saints to get evangelical preaching past this point. Today's evangelicals preach a once-saved-evermore-saved to get people past even being bothered by their sinning, but this introduces its own poisons.

So it is, also, that the modern -- triumphant over disease, glorified by radio, triumphant over the atom and the atmosphere -- had a horror betraying each marvel. Every chemist could be a murderer, and every physicist a world killer. The Janus mask of the 20th century never came off, and being responsible was too much for anyone but the most glib, oblivious, or maniacal.

Finally, though, Lowell's own guilt is captured. The depressive will fall back to William Cowper's malady of feeling damned and need distraction or encouragement, but all of the latter will fail, as it does not penetrate the internal certainty -- the "Satan let loose." Lowell, who had his insanity possibly as an incubus, had his guilt, too.

The flies that fall to the water's edge are food to the trout.

Where do babies come from? Your Levi's

"Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;

And I will cry with my loud lips and publish

Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,

It is so frail." -- John Crowe Ransom, "Blue Girls"

Hold that thought.

On the television, they have medicines more various than any Wild West show tent. At the break of the 20th century, men adventurous and adventitious went about with products to cure each malady, even the ones that people hadn't any idea they suffered from. (Be aware, O ye historically naive, that the wild west in 1825 was Alabama, that it did not go to Texas, Arizona and the like until the 1840's, and the people who showed up fully grown malcontents were already twisted criminals back home in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi.)

The television makes money for people today as surely as the newspapers did then. Why, now you can not only cure your iron-poor blood, but you can make your eye lashes grow! The huckster's old claim that "it" will restore youth has turned into "Regeneris" face cream to putty-in wrinkles or Botox to freeze them, and his pitch that "it" will grow hair on a bald man is, at long, long last, a dream come true. O brave new world that has such creams and potions in it! In fact, the same pill can relieve the blues or relieve your pain, and this is revolutionary, because, in the past, we were only worried about nasty, evil people who, when sad, would go buy illegal drugs that would make them happy and relieve their pain.

Well, among the illnesses we have discovered once we found their cures on the television was "man-o-pause" or, for those wanting language that sounds less like a joke, "andropause." ("Andros" is the Greek word for male, but that "pause" is a problem.) Here is a typical discussion, guys. It will help you with "that little problem."

Now, me? I entered into the shadow of death long ago, and time's umbra covered me in its numbing wing. Like the noble mosquito, "it doesn't hurt when it begins," but, of course, it does not merely begin. I was never particularly over dosing on martial prowess, or any other sort, but a few blood tests showed the infamous "low T." I thus found a ready supplier of injectables and began a few months of imitating Barry Bonds and other heroes of the game.

My motivation on the surface was to rectify biochemical abnormalities and to achieve triglyceride reduction. My ulterior motivation was the relief of fatigue. Really, it was. Ok, and some awakening of desire, but not in any way the other. That, alas, has not been a concern.

You don't care about why, though. You want to know what happened. Well, after a full summer of shooting the dope every two weeks, I have decided to return to my old self. The effect of exogenous testosterone was....

Do you know where babies come from? They come from lawn mowers. Now, I have never seen a lawn mower directly involved in the insemination or ovulation or carrying of a fetal human, but I have noticed an overwhelming correlation between young couples purchasing a lawn mower and producing a baby. Newly weds beware the John Deere salesman! Unless the purchase is of an ATV -- which is a well known contraceptive and cause of sterility -- any purchase of a lawnmower is likely to cause conception.

Not many people are aware of this correlative relationship, but I figured it out about the time my friends Bill and Donna bought a lawn and then a lawn mower. I had no proof of causality, no isolation of the agent, but I knew the phenomenon. I could not isolate the cause... until now! You see, taking testosterone made me want to mow the lawn.

I'm serious. All summer, I watched the grass grow, hoping for it to recover from its last scalping so that I could go inflict more savagery upon it. I loved the soaking with sweat, the smushing of dog poo, the face slap of tree branches, the stings of the ants. I stomped and chopped and was smelly, wet, and manly.

I was not, however, more lusty. Not in one way or the other. Nor did I grow large. Not in one way or the other.

So, do I quit shooting it because autumn will be coming in two or three months? No.

Remember that quote from John Crowe Ransom? Well, compare it to something I wrote recently: "The youth of beauty, and the beauty of youth, demand those who lost years to watch and demand them to seek out the joy of their own vital pulse, the concerns of the overhang and undertow that remove their exceptions, and who can blame either party? The one who missed and misses longed and longs and surfaces briefly in the filling of senses, and the one in potential is compelled and curtailed, devoted and dovetailed by and in time. Nature could allow no exception, and will complies." Pretty whiny, isn't it?

What both of them are talking about is that men and women who grow older as they stand before college audiences notice, more and more keenly, the beauty of young members of the opposite sex. The desire increases as the distance from the competition for them does. Now, there certainly are creeps. Make no mistake: some people are creeps and maladaptive fools. However, every one I have known has been content to sit in the stands and watch the game, has loved walking through the gallery and looking at the paintings. None of them has grown confused and tried to grab the merchandise, run onto the field, or believed that he or she was in the game.

Actually, I take that back. Very recently, I knew of a teacher who was by no means on the field nor artist. However, every female student reported that she was creeped out by the way he looked at her. They were not able to articulate precisely what it was, but they knew what they experienced, understood what was conveyed. The pornographic gaze wishes to take. It wishes to strip, to dissect, to grab, and to own. The other one... the aged eye, I suppose, wishes to linger and to revel and is shy; it wants the original to remain. (It can be as guilty of objectifying as anything -- is guilty -- but not guilty of malice.)

John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt saw the pretty girls. This is no surprise. Robert Herrick saw them too. Whether a man has the years to justify it or not, the same feeling is the same: presence calls to loss, loss longs for surfeit. Surfeit never knows itself. These are truths abiding. However, the sweet melancholy plays an artistic tune in even the dullest woman or man.

At the same time, Levi's Jeans company is running commercials, has been running them, which purport to be American (TM). They have Frosty sounding recitations. "You (glug glug) are a god!/ The gods (glug) dance before you (glug)/ Hoping to catch your radiance (glug glug) on their tongues/ The dumb jerks," the poet says, and we see truly spectacular images of youth.

I'm amazed. The pictures are exactly like the poetry. Both are seductions. Read the Whitman, or the Ginsberg. These are poetic lines in praise of the young American, and of American youth, that is primarily flattering, not celebratory. Instead of taking a real quality and showing its beauty, it takes a quality and gives it hyperbolic, mythic, supernatural qualities. Instead of, "You weave through the air," it is "her skin is like nature dipp'd her hands in milk." Everyone knows that the lover gets the beloved by compliments.

The message from Levi's is not "go, do something," but "come here, you." The visuals celebrate the bodies of youth, youth stretching, contorting, sweating, and doing other physical functions that show the body's shapes and features alone, and they do so wonderfully but synecdotally. Each is a clipped fragment rather than a montage. The message is, "Your blue jeans want to have you," rather than "you want to have blue jeans."

Perhaps young buyers are flattered by the commercials, but it's more likely that men and women of my age are stricken by sympathy pains. We, like the commercial, long for what is lost, and we will buy some jeans. We will need some help, perhaps, need a supply, but we will avoid that longing and shovel dirt into the hole.

Immigrants!

I was on my way to my church today (it's the mother church for America, of course), and I drove past a number of businesses whose names I only noticed for the first time. One of these was tucked away into a dying -- which is to say non-Wal*Mart -- shopping center and had been in business for several years. I had seen it and its storefront and its sign and its customers on many occasions, but I had never noticed it.

(Who knew? It's a chain! This one is in Virginia.)

That's right: Star Nails. I see now that "Star Nails" is a thing that one can get a franchise for, that it is a company that sells kits and licenses, rather than an actual company that staffs. I do not know if being Vietnamese and female is required for getting the franchise, but, given the uniformity of operators, it seems like it could be. (The mini-icon for the franchise company looks like a lotus flower.)

I have nothing particularly against immigrants, myself. About half of you, I understand, are "very concerned" by those immigrants and want them to "go back where they came from." It's easy to feel that way -- harder to think that way. According to a recent study, most of the folks taking the hard "conservative" stance these days are, in fact, not thinking, but feeling, to start with, and they have enlarged amygdalas. (Some time I mean to write about that study, because I'd say that it's not conservativism that appeals to the reptilian brain.) It's lovely to think in big, gelatinous lumps, to feel secure that the problems are "those people" and that they "need to" do something simple like "go back." It feels wonderful to have an answer.

Unfortunately for me, my family arrived on these shores in the 1630's, so I have had to give up on anti-immigrant feeling. Ever since those nasty Scots started showing up in the teens (1810's, I mean), things have been going down hill. The Germans, Jews, Irish, Slavs.... If we're going to complain, then can't I complain that they're all filthy immigrants coming in to take jobs that belong to the colonials like me? The only ones who have any right to complain -- aside from the Indians, of course -- are the descendants of the enslaved Africans. They've been here as long as the planter families and colonists and frigid Puritans. Curiously, when I see anti-immigration protests in Arizona or Texas, I don't see Black people or Colonial families.

It could be, of course, that the Colonials never did protest immigration, that the "Know Nothings" and the like were always a product of immigrants themselves turning on immigration. In The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson is listing all the violations of divine law and common rights that George III had made, and he lists:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

You see, we of the Colonies wanted immigration. We even went to war to allow it. Now, yabbos want to arm themselves to prevent it, and one Great Tit demands the use of Predator drones to blow up economic migrants.

Vietnamese tend to face less of the hatred than "messicans." Nevertheless, the Americans who hate immigrants hate them, too. They say the immigrants stick together, that they talk their foreign language to each other, that they use only their own family members, etc. (They say the same about Indians, of course.)

Me?

I want to know what the heck a star nail is.

Is it a nail made of flaming gas? Is it what a person uses to tack a star in place so that it doesn't slide down the wall? Obviously, if the salon were offering fingernails and toe nails that look the same as Hollywood and Broadway stars, it would be called "Stellar Nails" or "Starring Nails." If it offered nails that shone as if stars in the sky (would anyone want that? it would require them to be 6,000 degrees C), then they'd call the place "Sparkling Nails" or "Twinkling Nails" or "Fusion Powered Nails" or "H-bomb Nails," since I doubt they have the secret of sustained fusion chain reactions (and, if they did, would they not be Topamak Nails?).

We know the place is owned and operated by immigrants, but what if their sign means exactly what it says? What if they really are selling star nails? What if the ladies (and always one boy) working in the place are not from an indistinct far eastern nation believed to be Vietnam but some place... farther away?

Think about it, man.

Sympathy for the Plague Rats

Stranger passing by, consider, for a moment, the plague rat. In the hold of a ship, gnawing on grain or bounding out onto a dock – weaving through odor rich streets or spinning a nest of fabric, straw, string, and dirt for its young – the plague rat carries death along with it wherever it goes. We curse the creature, calling it by its ancient name of 'vermin' and 'pestilence.' The bird masks of the physicians in the seventeenth century that astonish people today might well have been matched by rat masks for the undertakers.

My thoughts have turned to this animal for natural reasons. On the Monday after Christmas, I was at a fine restaurant to have a fine sandwich of meat and dairy and a beverage of sugar and emolument. As I went into the Splash Mountain-style switch back of the line (queue, for our stranger strangers), a family came in behind me. Pa, for that, I feel certain, was his name, wore a Metallica tour t-shirt emblazoned with “Kill 'Em All” on it. Ma was wearing a plain jeans and shirt combo. Jr. was sporting black hair dye, wallet chain, an open jacket, and a weight problem, while his younger brother, Trip, was fitter, more appropriately rock 'n roll. Sister had very effective makeup and bangles and t-shirt and showed her figure to great advantage while obscuring her features in an unmistakeable announcement that she was not 'pretty.' She was made up in the way that they call 'emo' – which is to say the thing that happened when punk cosmetics were stolen by the heavy metal kids and then stolen by the goth kids and then stolen by the heavy metal kids again. Junior is the focus of this story, though. Junior was a plague rat.

Pa may have had the t-shirt, but Junior had the power. Although he spoke with perfect politeness and effeminacy, Junior accomplished his goal by coughing at a rate of five to seven times a minute without ever once bringing a hand or arm up to block. He did not cover his mouth or even show a twitch of a muscle as if any part of his brain had any motor impulse toward covering the cough. He did not turn his face toward the ground, or away from people. He simply coughed, straight ahead, constantly, from his doughy face toward whatever surface was unlucky enough to be within three meters of him.

I pulled up the hood to my jacket. I turned away. I went to a different cashier. I sat away from them. I did what I could, even if it meant not getting to stare at Sis's body. I fell ill.

The next morning, I had a sore throat. The next day, I was coughing, and that night I nearly died. When I went to the doctor, he assumed, I think, that it was a boo-hoo cold, but, in fact, I had pneumonia. I had a good fever, and my breathing sounded like a hookah convention. (Hey! I'm Aqualung!)

Anyway, the word I used to describe Junior in my mind was “plague rat.” All during my illness (I'm a bit better, but I'm not healthy yet) the word stuck in my mind. It kept clicking, like a rock stuck in the tread of a sneaker, everywhere I went. I don't know how it is with you, Stranger, but when that happens to me, it usually means that I'm not done with the concept.

Oh, and it often means that Jungian synchronicity is going to happen.

Sure enough, the book I've been reading at lunch, At Home, by Bill Bryson, talked about the plague after I had fixated on my term. He made the point that the plague killed the rats right along with the people, and so it isn't as if the plague rats were getting out of the deal unscathed. Indeed, we think of the plague rat as a creature maliciously spreading a disease, but, in fact, it is an animal that spreads a disease by bumbling.

The two-legged sort of plague rat – our bulbous friend at the Burger King – is a fool. He is sick, knows that he is sick, and thinks of no consequences. The world stops outside of his flesh, apparently, or outside of the present moment. Thus, he wants to go, and so he goes, but covering a cough is not an active thought. Or he could be a malicious animal of a different sort than we usually think by just being as selfish as a toddler. It might be that he feels that his suffering is the only suffering of any note, that the rest should suffer with him, or that his hunger is more important than another's safety. Any one of these three would be wicked, but stupidly wicked, bestially wicked.

I think most plague rats, though, are fools, not egomaniacs. Consider the rat itself. If we want to find a wise rat, a rat with complicity, we need to look at the ship's rat that knows that the ship is sinking and manages to jump just in time. That's the clever rat. Odds are that the ship is out at sea and it won't make any difference, but at least the rat has escaped a certain death. The plague rat, on the other hand, has no foreknowledge, cannot read the weather, cannot see the fireships sailing alongside, cannot feel the creak in the wood, doesn't know the bilge is backing up, doesn't realize that the last flea bite was worse than the one before, doesn't notice that there are extra bumps on its arm pit and neck. The plague rat just gets sick and dies.

You see, that other rat – the swimmer – is incomprehensible to me. I feel less sympathy for it.

I moved to Manhattan in August, 2001. In a month, terrorists attacked. At the end of the year, my boss left her position to take another, sealing my doom in the job. The next year, as I prepared to leave, the power went out to the entire northeast of the U.S. I moved down to Baltimore that year and began working in a public school. The pay was good, but I started in August and, by October, there were whispers of crisis. By December, it was clear that the school system had a budget of -$130,000,000. The prior year's administration had written one hundred and five million dollars of bad checks. By January, all persons hired that year were laid off, which meant me. Private grants kept me employed through the term. At the start of the next school year, the principle, vice principle, and eighty percent of the administration had left, and I was unemployed. I moved down to where I am now, and things seemed alright. Last year, they eliminated 20% of the faculty.

The plague rat is leading a doomed existence, and its illness makes it seek a nest all the more. It thus nestles close to people most urgently, and its corpse's passengers flee. The ship's rat leaves just before the disaster strikes. I have never understood the ship's rat, and I'm beginning to feel more and more sympathy for the other fellow.

Seed on the Dusty Plain

We choose our friends, but not our family, the proverb goes. Neither, I think, do we choose where we were planted.

I have been reading Mark -- mainly because I almost always read Luke and do not like John so much and therefore tend to go a long time unacquainted with Mark -- and I have stopped temporarily at the parable of the good seed. That was on Saturday. On Monday, yesterday, I went along toward the great metropolis where the Wal*Mart has replaced the K-Mart (a friend of mine defines "New South" as "n. the thing that exists just before the Wal*Mart replaces the K-Mart"), and I hit a familiar pothole in the road. Driving a sleek sports car as I do, each pothole is noticed, and I would not wish to ruin my fine suspension with one.

This particular pothole is, as I said, familiar. It is familiar because I hit it regularly. First, I hit it because I am in position to hit it after I dodge a prior hole. Second, though, I hit it because a shadow falls across the road just at that point and obscures the hole. Since I have no depth perception due to an old dueling accident, I use light and shade to determine distance as I drive, and therefore I miss this hole nearly every day that I go on that road.

As I worried about my finely tuned linkages, I absolved the pothole of any responsibility. I realized that, when it comes to blame, there is none. The tree came first (it is a white oak), and the road is the newcomer. The pothole chose to occur in the shade of the tree -- probably literally -- rather than the tree choosing to hide the hole from me.

That led me to consider something. It's hard for trees. Trees have trouble enough without us, and then we add more. Watch a construction site some time, and you will notice that the first act of builders is to blow hell out of every tree. They will then mow, push, level, and then pave. After that, they will pour cement where they want it, build the object desired, and then finally come back in and, at great cost, plant trees that are of a different type, different family, and different but uniform age, to "ornament" the place. (I link there, because some land was given to that university on condition that none of the trees be harmed. The bulldozers blew hell out of every tree, and then they said, "Oops. Do you want the land back now, lady?")

What can a tree do? It doesn't choose its family, nor its genus or species. It doesn't choose its location, either, and in that way it has an even worse time than we do. We can get violent -- most often do -- and take aim at body or mind, or shrink to nothingness, or wander off into the wild to die horribly from some inexorable Universe that will be deaf to our cries. (I wonder if more male geriatrics wander off to their deaths than female? I would hypothesize so.)

A tree is stuck, waiting for fungus, storm, drought, or the axe to drop it.

It's only hope is to hide.

A neighbor across the way had pines growing all around his house. His house had been built according to the usual plan -- meaning that whatever had been there had been blown hell out of and pines had been planted because they grow quickly and drop needles and cones that people like -- and there was a veritable corona of telephone-pole-straight pines all around his house. Then, though, his brother or brother-in-law, who, like him, was on a fixed income, had a pine fall into the house during a storm. After the premium increase, the deductible, and everything else, he was ruined. The neighbor concluded, therefore, that the stupid pines were more stupid trouble than they were worth -- the stupid things. He and his son, therefore, went out to clear them. They hired a local free agent to haul the trees, but he and son did the cutting.

The buzzing and crashing went on all day. When they were done, they were in a little house on a prairie. They were small bubble of brick on a blight and stumps, although they hired men with tractors to pull the stumps up. (Pines are easy that way.) The thing is, he missed one.

He didn't see it. He and his grown son both kept on cutting, and they walked around a tree all day without seeing it. That pine tree had learned the great secret of knowing how to hide.

Some trees are lucky and clever and learn the mystic secret of hiding from us, from pests, from storms. In their dotage, of course, they will forget and be caught, but the trees that evade, the ones that face up to their circumstances and limitations -- these are heroes, I think.