As I sit at our farm before the Sun has even thought of
rising, I sense a slight rough spot in the greased grooves of the Universe. Two
of the Queen B’s dogs have altered their morning resting routines. Why?
Betty Lou, the 50-pound tomboy who was supposed to have been
a fox-terrier mix, is asleep on the couch instead of the green recliner. Suzi, the Evangelist, has chosen
another chair. She normally faces me in the morning with a supplicating look on
her face as if my salvation were the only important thing in our postage-stamp galaxy.
She was rescued by the Queen and her mother, the Lady Hazel, from underneath an
abandoned church where she had lived for some time with her collection of toys:
a tin can, one long stick, several rags, and a hand-fan from a long defunct
funeral home. She seems to have turned her back on me today.
So what’s up? Is there perhaps a small hole in the Curtain
of Reality? Do I care to sneak a peek? One remembers, of course, the ending of
William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.” Luster, one of the Compton family’s
“boys,” offers to take Benjy, the idiot man-child, on his daily carriage ride
and opts to circle the town square counter-clockwise, instead of clockwise as
per the daily routine. Benji goes berserk until Luster turns their horse
Queenie around and then:
“I could hear Queenie's feet and the bright shapes went
smooth and steady on both sides, the shadows of them flowing across Queenie's
back. They went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side
stopped at the tall white post where the soldier was. But on the other side
they went on smooth and steady, but a little slower.”
In short, things were as they should be.
Life in our country, as in this modest living room in the midst
of nowhere, certainly seems about to change, and maybe the dogs presage it. It
may not seem a major event to the few remaining of the generation that lived
through the three-fold catastrophe of WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII, but
it unsettles a thinking person in present times. Is it comforting to realize
that, far from a modern feeling, it was expressed years ago, this sense of impending
change? Matthew Arnold alluded to it in the Victorian era and even hearkened
back to ancient times in his epic “Dover Beach,” to wit”
“Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.”
So I guess I had best prepare for … oh wait … Betty Lou just
moved to her normal chair and Suzi has turned to stare at me.
Never mind.
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| Worth reading anyway |
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