And Will Again

Munch, munch, swish.

I’ve done this one before, or one very like it, I think while nosing my way around a milkweed.

An idle thought, like all of them, but vaguely comforting in an indifferent universe, especially when combined with a sunny day and grass just turning crispy, yet still holding a juicy touch of last week’s rains.

Downright peaceful.

“Moo,” said Millie, ever the alarmist.

The rest of us ignore her, except for Amy, who spares a quick glance up at all the nothing that prompted the remark.

Based on the smell of the air and the girth of the other herd members — grotesquely huge to our forebears, though unfashionably lean just a few generations later — I estimate the when and where as late nineteenth century and upper Midwest, perhaps Iowa or Illinois. 

An idle game, like placing a Londoner within a few streets by their accent, or a vintage Chablis by its acidity, sniffing the year carried neither rewards nor consequences of any importance. 

A lot like Lithuania at the same time, although not quite as musty and spicy. 

In mild surprise, I hear the unhealthy stutter of a Stearman M-2 to the south and revise my estimate by a few decades.

As a hawk soaring above the continent, I once surveyed a perspective of borderless terrain laid out for hundreds of miles in every direction, but gave attention only to the snake directly below me. As a mouse, I worried about both the hawk and the snake.

And as me, I feel all of it once.

Why pick this particular now? 

Munch. Swish.

Why not?

The immortal soul part of me, recalling some thousands of incarnations, wonders at the meaning of it all, notes the resemblance of clouds overhead to fractal geometry and the white blotches on Millie’s hide, and regrets losing my car keys in 1978.

The current cow part of me couldn’t care less about any of it.

Munch, munch.

Come to think of it, clouds remind me of everything.

Swish, swish. 

I was that fly once, impressed but not daunted by the size of the tail whipping past. Respect for the environment, quick reflexes, and luck got me through the day. The same combination failed us all at Teutoburg, but no worse than a million other times before or after.

In another life, the nearly perfect yin-yang design near Millie’s tail might get me thinking of flank steaks and barbecue, but today it reminds me of an argument I had with Chuang-Tzu about consciousness and objective reality.

We used to call him “Slick” and tease him about the time he accidentally threw out an appointment letter from King Wei, and then had to tell everyone who asked that worldly success meant nothing to him.

That night we took him out drinking and pretended to believe him. 

“A fool learns from no one,” he said, winking confidentially, the tip of his beard bobbing in a bowl of cheap beer, “but a wise man spouts cryptic aphorisms.”

Amy (like me, king of her own infinite nutshell but coincidentally also my daughter here and my owner’s neighbor in fourteenth century Trebizond) looks up again.

The pilot (my close cousin by one route, a distant ancestor by another and a drone in the same hive a few millennia ahead) has no chance to bail out and couldn’t deploy a chute at that altitude anyway.

The burning balsa and fuel seasons our grass with an intriguing piquancy for more than an hour afterward as Cousin Vernon starts a turn as a mouse in the Sonora Desert.

I don’t know from destiny, but his luck always sucked.

Millie ventured no comment on the noise or the smell, but all of our ears twitched because of the ground trembling from the impact.

Amy puts things in perspective, repeating a remark she first made during an ancient campaign to her brother-descendant-messmate in Publius Varus’s twelfth legion (currently on his way to a knighthood and Bretton Woods): “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

Vain belief in nonsense like magic, aliens or causation can’t change that.

On the other hand, enlightenment and 10 cents gets you a cup of coffee. 

Munch.

If I have to learn something this time around, I hope it doesn’t involve perspective.

In the short run, we’re all alive. Why get off the wheel just to get on another wheel?

Sorry, Slick. You ain’t you, and you ain’t the butterfly.

Maybe you’re the dream.

The farmer (my mate when we nested on the shore of Lake Baikal) brings his wagon around toward the wreckage and stops far enough away so the mule (our second grandchild) won’t spook. 

I shift a few steps northward to a patch with less milkweed and nudge Mille over.

“Moo,” she says, and we all roll our eyes. She was with Arminius that day.

The farmer looks at the scar in the landscape and figures the damage will last three seasons. He loads Vernon into the wagon, wipes his hands on a pocket rag, and drives away without giving me a glance. If this chore distracts him enough from thinking about the time I ruined him at baccara in Sanremo, maybe milking won’t hurt as much tomorrow.

At the time, I considered it karmic balance for when he ate me in a reef off Vanuatu.

Wiser now, I realize neither of us mean it personally, and baccara holds no appeal.

The blame lies partly with economics, partly with personalities, but with neither as much as weather, luck, demographics or fashion. Even Vernon/Varus agreed with that view as we carted the inebriated sage home, none of us giving any consideration to all the time we spend as soldiers, cows, birds, insects or amoebae.

Tomorrow none of us will remember Sanremo, Teutoburg, the beer, the beard or the Pacific. Farmer will remember the Stearman and the scar. For me, the crispy grass will have faded even while it gurgles through my third stomach.

The current amoeba, having felt it’s way around for half a billion years, remembers everything.

Munch, munch, fart.

Hey, maybe they fell behind the Mr. Coffee. 

Swish.