A Gulf South December day
It’s 74 degrees outside in the middle of December, and two people just went running by the LaLa scantily clothed. The sun isn’t shining yet, because it’s been cloudy – meaning the humidity makes you want to remove any scant clothes you do have.
A biker went by in bright orange muscle shirt and shorts. Seagulls are hovering around the bayou. A man with a white short sleeved shirt walks down the sidewalk across the bayou, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.
More seagulls.
Birds are chirping up a storm in the backyard as if it were a spring day.
Across the bayou I see neighbors’ holiday lights twinkling and the Christmas trees inside lit up. It’s December and we should be erecting palm trees with lights not evergreen spruce.
Appearances aren’t always trustworthy – from inside the house, the grey skies and bare trees suggest a winter landscape, outside its humid and warm and feels more like an early summer day.
More birds come. Another biker in a tank top.
My bare feet on the cool wood floors.
If you didn’t read the papers or listen to the news you would mistake this for paradise, but my email blast yesterday from Silence is Violence said they are raising funds for nine families who have children (20 years old to 2 years old) killed or injured by a bullet recently.
The birds are circling.
The souls are hovering around.
Boys with guns are here.
A Louisiana brown pelican just threw open its wide wing span and looked down at its prey below the surface of the water. The fish eyes only see sideways, they don’t look up.
December 21st, 2011 at 9:16 am
We need the eyes of a raptor, at once able to scan a wide field of vision and then lock onto not the prey but the predator. We think in our modern comfort that we should not have to live this way, but we are sitting on our comfortable porches scrolling through our phones because 10,000 generations before us survived, understood the both the bounty and the threats of ground they lived on in intricate detail, fashioned in progression fired sticks, flint, bronze, iron and steel to protect themselves. We have to remember how to harden ourselves to a predatory world to survive. We could flee to the country, trade corner boys for coyotes and blighted tomatoes, one problem for another, trading pleasure for a sense of security but is that a compromise we are willing to make? Somewhere along that biblically long line of descendents we built cities, erected walls we believed would protect us, and learned instead to defend ourselves from the people within.
December 22nd, 2011 at 6:48 am
I was reading in Facebook a suggestion that we bring back public hangings and that maybe that would deter killings. Seems to me that I go back to that example of the young elephant bulls that were transported out of their habitat in a culling effort done by some shortsighted park planner in Africa. Away from the papa bulls, the young bulls started going wild, even raping hippopotamuses. Absent getting cuffed by someone you actually fear as a toddler you grow up to believe you are all powerful (particularly with a gun in your hand) even when you’re still just a scared kid. I’m reading a book about rough housing with your children. Yesterday, I took Tin out to the bayou and played football and tackle. The psych behind it is that if you rough house with your kid, you show them that you are amply stronger than they are, and that you are restraining your strength, this helps them grow up feeling protected and yet understanding on a primal level a sense that there is someone stronger than them who chose not hurt them but instead to use strength for play and fun. I believe that everyone of these young turks running around with a gun needs to be read books when they’re babies, needs a warm meal in their bellies to go to school, needs to know that their parent(s) are stronger but kind, and that there are other avenues to self actualization such as music which we offer in abundance here, or art, or writing, or even fishing, or cooking, or all of the other things that bring us such great joy and help inch us to paradise. How do we get there, Mark?