Gardener

I found them lying side by side, dead, heads firmly clamped to the base of the trap. Liebestot, Wagner calls it, love in death. I hope their deaths were instantaneous, that these “wee, cowrin’, timorous beasties” had no chance for a “panic in [their] breasties.” Notice how tenderly the little hand caresses the partner's head--love in death. The trap had been set the day before, after my wife, coming in from the garage, surprised one of them in the entryway. We assumed they had gained entrance through the garage door which had been left open frequently during the past week by the carpenter doing some remodeling in our kitchen. I imagine them as mates, drawn to the warmth of an open door and, later, to a midnight snack of peanut butter. And then, death! The romantic in me wants to find a silver lining in the fact that they died together, lovers. Neither of them will have to grieve. But if I can believe Bobby Burns, and I do on this point, mice—and most animals—live in a kind of const...

It must have been early in the morning, of the fourth day that God in the pre-dawn deep blue-blackness whispered to himself, “Music,” though it wasn’t the English word,"music," English not yet existing nor, for that matter, any other earth language. So God said softly in God language, “Music” as he imagined all those birds at dawn—though why it had to be birds that sang and not, say, rodents or cats or large non-human mammals, I don’t know. (Blue whales,of course, sing and have actually made a best selling album; still it’s birds that are the earth’s primary singers—they do it for a living so to speak.) He must have heard in his mind’s ear all those birds waking up, breaking the silence with their first hesitant chirps and cheeps, trills and gurgles, then gradually gaining confidence and soaring into songs of dawn. But what a good idea, music—maybe his best creation though it’s hard to pick one best thing, Eve being a pretty terrific idea and all the tasty foods and, of c...

Our lives are like lawns full of dandelions. I know it’s a clichéd metaphor, but it’s a pretty good visual image and besides it fits the picture. Wouldn’t it be lovely if our lives were as flawless as this lawn? But they’re not, and I was reminded of that the other night after church. Here’s the scene: People are milling around in the narthex after a church service when a former student from long ago, someone who looks nearly as old as I do, sidles up and after a bit of small talk says, “I just gotta tell you this—I plagiarized in your class. You handed back a paper and said to me, ‘Did you write this? It doesn’t sound like you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I wrote it,’ so you smiled, handed back the paper and walked on.” How should one respond to such a confession—forty years after the deed? I’ve had this experience three or four times, and this last time I said something like, “Oh, well, I suspect most of us have done something like that at one time or another. I remember when I handed in somethin...