The Allegory of the Hogs

I had a dream last night that might have been allegorical. It took me back to my childhood and my long-departed father’s hog pen. As I say, it was allegorical, certainly not historically accurate. Sainted Father raised farm animals, a few, but was very kind to them. His reason for raising them? It was so he would have an excuse to go out, after 14 hours of running his grocery, and have a good nip of Old Yellowstone under the pretense of feeding his animals. One nip. One nip only. If a rare case of backsliding occurred, and one nip became two, all hell would break loose. You don’t even want to imagine Sainted Mother in a state of rage.

Anyway, back to the dream. In a bizarre setup, he had three pens where he fed animals. In one were ten huge boars. Next to it, in another pen, stood a crowd of sows and piglets with their noses pressed against the fence. In the last pen stood a male skunk who was rumored far and wide to be stricken with rabies. All the neighbors, along with our family, wanted the skunk gone and forgotten.

On a typical evening, Daddy would come out and ladle bucket after bucket of nourishing food to the boars while the sows and piglets watched. The skunk would sulk.

In the dream, Daddy, suddenly, one evening, decided that things were out of balance. When the usual crowd gathered in the store next morning, he vowed that he was going to straighten out the problem of imbalance he had with feeding his animals.

“About time,” said Sam the bread man.

  

“That makes sense,” said Sol who ran a body shop next door.

“It just ain’t right what you are doin’ now,” said the canned-goods salesman.

“Yep,” Daddy said, “I need to feed my pet skunk more.” Before the startled group could respond, he eased out the front door of the store to “wait on” a gas customer.

True to his word, that evening, he instituted his redirection of nourishment. After he ladled the usual rations to the boars, he cursed the sows and piglets for not growing fast enough and slopped a quarter-bucket of feed into their trough. “Here, losers,” he said.

He walked over to the skunk, who pretended not to notice him. He smiled and then walked back to the boars’ pen and dipped a full bucket of feed from their share, hoisted it over the fence, and poured it for the skunk.

You should have heard the sound from the boars’ pen. Although they could rarely manage to eat all their rations at once, the unfairness of losing any of it caused great uproar. In fact, they stampeded to the gate and began trying to get to the skunk’s pen to retrieve their lost rations.

Yes, you might imagine the scene. Each boar would try to scoot his swollen form underneath the exit only to get caught. Then each would raise the most unholy ruckus you’d ever heard.

You might say that each of them was squealing like a hog stuck under a gate.

I still don’t know what it meant, but the sounds woke me up. They might have awakened Sainted Mother too. Too bad for Daddy if they did.

Please Sir ...