Yesterday I took a break from my planting activities and watched a little ant drag a big dead caterpillar across the driveway. Thing must've been 10 times his size, and even though the driveway is smooth asphalt, at his scale it had plenty of ridges and potholes.
Not to anthropomorphize, but I imagined his thought process. If the caterpillar got hung up and the ant couldn't drag it any more, he'd stop, go around to the back, and see what the snag was. When I got too close, he dropped his catch in order to scurry away and save himself. When a blade of grass got in the way, he assessed all the options and rerouted. Really fascinating to watch.
The previous day, we found half of a blue jay under the daylilies. When we got close, it tried to fly away, but with missing wing parts and no tail feathers at all, that didn't work. B put it out of its pain (we debated the intervention for awhile) and later it was gone entirely, leaving just a scattering of feathers on the lawn.
It's been sort of a vacation not to have yardwork for the last several years, but I've missed the windows into nature offered by these sorts of contacts.
In other news - we are on the East Coast. The department is still on fire (burn it to the ground, I say) and there's a constant flurry of emails. We are working on home maintenance (both our place and my SIL's) and dealing with family obligations. Good times...
I wrote an entry about our friend Chris on Wednesday, but my web connection failed just as I went to post it, and the entry was lost.
Chris Maus, who introduced B and me in 1986, died last Tuesday night, 5/2/06, after a 16-month battle with cancer. He was 45. He was an architectural designer, a musician, a visionary and thinker, a computer geek, and a dear, dear friend. We met him in Boston (he and I worked at the same architectural firm) but his roots - despite his protestations! - were here in the heartland. His can-do "pioneer spirit" in building his cabin by hand in the Wisconsin woods, his independence and self-sufficiency, his minimizing of his pain throughout all the cancer treatments and at the end: all these are testament to his spirit and character.
His sister Mary called to share the sad news on Wednesday morning, and his father and wife called on Thursday to update us on the arrangements. His funeral was last Friday in Cold Spring, MN - a day that started raw and cold but turned sunny and springlike during the course of the burial mass.
The priest gave a eulogy that was a little too pat and practiced - but still it jolted some questions in me: what is the right life to live? What are the right things to strive for? Part of my despair at the death of loved ones is that I can't believe in a hearts-and-flowers concept of heaven, where we are all reunited after this earthly toil - but if I can take some comfort in his life and example, it's that Chris marched to the beat of a different drummer, and showed by example that conventional goals of prestige in the workplace, making lots of money on the 9-5 treadmill, and the consequent inattention to the world of nature and the environment are hollow, shallow ways to live.
Good things to keep in mind.
When I was five, and "auditioning" for private school first grade because the public schools in my town were too bureaucratic and uptight to allow a 5-year-old in,* but my mother was desperate to get rid of at least ONE of the four kids to a gainful day, I proudly volunteered to the school rep that 0 + 0 = 1. (Extrapolating from 1+1=2, it made sense at the time.)
*the next year, second grade, the SAME public school called my mom and had her come in for a conference to see about my zipping right along to third grade. I would've started college at 16! Wisely, she declined, and I spent the next 11 years with the sorriest bunch of in-fighting, back-stabbing, power-hungry Irish-Americans you could imagine.
But where was I going with this? Hunh. I really have no idea.
Two years later, there were youth riots all over the world and a sense that structural change was really possible. I am in the next generation, the one that believes that change would have been possible, if only everyone weren't so tired of the reality of trying to make a living. This comes to mind because I watched a film for City in Film class tonight called "Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000" and started thinking about the "radicals" I knew in the 60s and where they've ended up. I had older cousins, so I had some exposure to that world. (For example: one became a lawyer but gave up social justice for mergers and acquisitions, go figure.)
The point is: although cocooned in my child's world, I had awareness of conflicts, through the newspaper articles my father read to my mother every night while she was cooking dinner, through photos in Life magazine (when it was real photojournalism, not that pap that comes (sometimes) in the Friday paper, and through exposure to older kids who were dealing with college. I'll be interested to see what view my students have of the THM of the 60s.