Sometimes, a fable can sneak into our heads in a way that cold, hard reality doesnt. That’s why I like writing stories like this.
Jeremy was not a bad squirrel, at least not in the sense that he deliberately tried to harm anyone. But he was selfish, looking out for himself whenever he had the chance. He lived in a nest made of oak leaves high above the place called Five Oaks, where the ancient oak trees grow so tightly together that a cool darkness sat on the forest floor all day.
The fountain is on. Word goes through the neighborhood as if it has to, forming language to express what anyone hears well enough as the murmur of water. We say it to each other not because we have to tell the story, but because something deep inside us says we have express our joy. The Irvine Park fountain is on! It’s summer in Saint Paul, finally!
Think for a moment on how much you know about the world around you. If there’s a debate about banning a very useful chemical because some people have found it is toxic or dangerous, what is your opinion? If that’s too much, what do you know about how the operations of the Legislature that is debating your taxes and services for the next year? Perhaps we should try something simpler – how do you know if the sneakers you are wearing were made with child labor?
Perhaps you say, “I don’t care. I’m too bizzy to worry about it all. There are experts to handle these things, I’ll trust them.” Which ones do you trust? In the next election, do you vote based on an appeal to your guts because it sounds right, and what do you get for it?
There’s never a bad time to inflict pun on people. All language is a kind of play on words, the meanings taken from the stage they are set on. Tying it all to some greater sense of the worldly is a gag about what happens when we’re not gagged, or how we express rather than exasperate. The problem is that most people take their lives so serially that they don’t get it. A good punster has to risk looking more and more the moron. If the joke’s on the language, the language is all a joke, it seems, and that can cause a lot of being cross to bear.
Bear with me on this, will you?
Without a cloud in sight and a temperature of 70F, it was a day to drive with the windows down and the radio turned up. The sweet smells of a budding spring mixed with a song by Schubert playing on the radio; it was a moment of vivacious joy in the few minutes I had to myself between dropping my work and picking up the kids.
That is, it was until I came to the stoplight. The car next to me held a young woman with similar plans but very different tastes in sound, rhythm and volume. My options were limited – roll up the windows and proclaim my own sonic territory or crank up Schubert really loud. Since I’m constant weary of standing out as the oddest duck in the pond, you can guess what I did. Schubert remained mine, and mine alone, as I wished everyone was willing to do.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 