Fireflies

I had come home from work

Feeling tired and disgusted.

Used and abused.

Put off and put upon.

H.G. Wells, in his essay

“Mind at the End of its Tether”

Had said a lot of what I was feeling.

Only with me there was more of a sense I could do better,

A sense that somehow it all had to be better than this.

I grabbed a lawn chair

And went out to the garden.

Sat among the ripening tomato plants

And blooming squash vines.

I sought solitude.

Needed silence among what nature does best.

Sometime later Pig showed up with another lawn chair

And a cooler of beer which he placed between us.

He held a raised finger to his lips

To show the non-verbal sign for silence.

I just looked at him wearily.

By the forth or fifth beer

The fireflies had come out.

On Pig’s first visit down South

These insects had fascinated him

So much

He chased them around the yard.

Collected them

Like a child would do.

Finally I broke the silence.

“I believe if I had been god,

I could have done a much better job.

Especially with the image and likeness thing.”

“If you were god,” Pig slowly pronounced each word,

“The harsh conditions of being absolutely reliable would kill you.

Think:

Everyday, everybody

Beseeching you,

Trusting you,

Testing you,

Praying to you to make things right,

Saying if you are really god

Why don’t you do this

Or asking why didn’t you do that.

Believe me

You would have thrown in the towel a long time ago.

I know I would have.”

I didn’t want to answer him.

I didn’t want to hear him.

Finally I said, “Beautiful answer, Pig.

But I don’t think it deals with the question I asked.

Is this the best God can do?

And if we are made in His image and likeness

What does that say about God, what does it say about us?

Nothing good that I can see.”

“I see his image and likeness all the time,

And I like what I see.”

I was not in too good of a mood when Pig came out

And now his answer shot right up to my brain,

Seared it and scorched me.

I shot back,

“Spare me your Wordsworth and your Blake.

Their ideas were hollowed

And their poetry sucks.”

I picked up my lawn chair and my beer

And headed back to the house.

Somewhere along the way I heard,

“To complain is to express suffering badly.”

I ignored Pig’s comment

And went on into the house.

Searching through my tapes for a good video to watch,

Selected Sam Pechingpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch.’

I had seen it over twenty times.

Choose it because it offered me no surprises

And plenty of good satisfying violence.

But once into the movie

I began wondering what would it have been like

To have been William Holden.

I liked his acting.

It had an effortless, natural quality to it.

But what I liked best was how he always seemed in control,

How he always had a handle on the situation.

God,

William Holden,

The world we live in.

Soon Pig walked in

And eased himself into the easy chair.

“Oh, William Holden and the Wild Bunch—

Great movie. It is the actors that pull this movie off.

Everybody talks about the violence, but it is the acting

That makes this one of Pechingpah’s best.

All he had to do was say, ‘roll em’

And Holden, Borgnine, Warren Oates did the rest.”

“And I bet no one once complained?”

“Probably not, not in a movie like that.

Not when everything goes smooth.

Well, maybe, the horses did,” Pig said with a smile.

“What about the horse’s asses?”

“Only when they were ridden hard,

And put into the barn wet,” said Pig still smiling.