Part 1.  Summer 2021.   Vagrancy revisited

On Memories. 

A number of years ago, back when Mara was not yet 3 and Jana was not born yet, I had been told that nobody retains their memories before the age of 3, and I thought shit, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, Mara will have no real memories of me.   This after all the countless hours of work I had done raising her, taking care of her, helping her figure out the world, and just spending endless time with her.

I didn't trust that Michelle would ever be able to give a true reckoning of my life to Mara.    Michelle, as we all probably do, lives in her own narrow rationalized worldview, and she never really showed an interest in my life beyond the life we shared together, shockingly to me not even asking me any real questions about my life, so I took it upon myself that if I was to be hit by that bus, to at least write a summation of my life up until that point, my first 43 years, so that Mara (and subsequently Jana) would have an idea of  How I Got Here.   All the things I did.   I called this summation "So far", and it came to about 60 pages or so.   And now - 20 years on - I believe its still up on my google drive somewhere.

This is my point.  When I started writing down the memories of my life, I had initially thought that the whole 43 years could be summed up in maybe 5 to 10 pages.    I scanned my life memories and thought that sure, 5 to 10 pages sounded about right.

But this is what happened.    You pull on a memory, call it up into your mind, and sit to write it down, and instead of it being a single encapsulated unit, it turns out to be a brightly colored string that pulls up a lot of tangential memories with it as well.   Memories that you did not even think were there.    It is almost like the mind stores one memory in place as a marker in an area you might call "My Massapequa High School Years", then when you pull it up, when you TRULY pull it up to examine it, you find a whole bunch of other hidden memories tagging along with the first one.   So you start writing about them as well.  Can't not do.

This is how SO FAR ended up being 60 pages or so.   When it was completed I sent it to my mother, and after reading it her first response was "You don't know the whole story".   I think she said that because in my "Growing Up" section I had mentioned that I have a step sibling or two that my siblings and I don't know about because we all think/know that my dad slept around along the way while we were growing up.

So my mom said "You don't know the whole story", but then she had a stroke on the operating table during a quintuple bypass operation at the age of 72, and even though she lived another 5 years in a nursing home, she couldn't talk anymore after that until the day she died, and now she is dead, as is my father,  so neither I or my siblings will ever know the "whole story", that is unless a DNA test one day shows us otherwise.   Maybe its for the best.  Maybe not.    It is what it is.

On the unconscious Slaughter of Innocen(ce)(ts).  

Just south of Pueblo Colorado going north on Interstate 25 yesterday, I ran over a squirrel that was just running across the highway.  Killed it. Couldn't slam on my brakes.  Going too fast.   Didn't think fast enough to swerve, cause swerving doesn't guarantee that you won't kill the animal anyway because they sometimes suddenly bolt back to the other side of the road and even though you swerved you killed them anyway.  I just prayed that I wouldn't kill it, but I did.  Felt the bump under the tires.  Saw the body go flying in my rearview mirror.   Fuck.  Shit.

The sadness for me was compounded by the fact that it was crossing the road with another squirrel.   I saw them both together, and I killed the one,  but not the other. and I can't get out of my head now that I killed that squirrel's brother, sister, or companion.   I deeply believe that all animals feel tragedy.  I have said sorry out loud many times in the past 24 hours, and asked God if I could have a do-over, but I know he doesn't answer to those kinds of requests.

It's messed me up in the head a little because I am just about 65 years old now and have managed to go my whole life without killing an animal on the road, and now I have.   I would have preferred to go my whole life without that experience. I guess I almost made it.

But killing that squirrel, despite being unintentional, has led me to think about all the deaths of animals that I have been party to., almost all them unintentional, but still I am responsible for.

1.   all the countless thousands of insects I have killed just going through life, either by swatting at them or stepping on them or on my bike or in my car.  How many thousands?  countless.

2. all the thousands of times I eat animal flesh that I thoughtlessly am responsible for by buying meat or fish in a supermarket, or eating as take out.   Its astonishing the numbers.   The old expression is "For you its just lunch.   For the pig its a total commitment".

3. when I was a kid I was holding a friend's bb gun and randomly aimed at a bird up on a wire, not thinking I would ever hit it, but I saw the feather's go flying and have wondered for the rest of my life what happened to it.

4. ditto a cat one time.

5.  my whole life, unless an insect is continually harassing me, even when it is in the house, I get a cup or a bowl and cover it, and then throw it outside.

I have gone my life mostly never intentionally killing anything, but I still know that I am responsible for a lot of deaths amongst animals.   Countless animals.  This FACT runs counter intuitive to my perception of myself as a thinking and caring human being.    I am having a hard time reconciling these two divergent truths, as they certainly cannot both be true.

I would like to think that I have spent my whole life edging towards being a vegetarian.   Yet even doing so would not stop the unconscious and unintentional UNSEEN slaughter on my part, but it would be a symbolic and positive move on that I could take.

Kurt Vonnegut has a short story about a prison planet where all of the inhabitants are placed on a planet of androids and forced to commit the same crime every day as the crime that they were sentenced to the planet for.   So if you were placed there for robbing a store, your sentence was to rob a store every day.  If you were there for murder, you had to murder every day.    The idea has always been intriguing to me, and I think the point of it was that eventually, if you were a prisoner, your humanity would eventually win over, and you would tire of the pain you caused, and tire of the remorse to others you caused every day.

The weird thing of it, the hook of the story, was that once a prisoner could not live with themselves hurting others anymore, and stopped committing the crime every day, he was freed and let go.

If we are placed here to elevate ourselves from our sins, maybe the answer is to just stop sinning.    I am not talking about the silly man made religious sins having to do with sex or the fodder that priests and shamans allude to, but if there any singular definition of sin at all, it surely would start with no longer being party to the killing of other living things around us.   Surely that would be the first one.