Beatific Musings

Sometimes a squirrel and a hummingbird will go out and make a day of it. The hummingbird scouts for acorns in hard-to-reach places, then knocks them down to the squirrel, who clicks his desperate gratitude. If the hummingbird gets tired, he can perch on the squirrel’s back and the squirrel will carry him for a while. If the squirrel dies, the hummingbird hovers over his body mournfully, his gaze darting this way and that in confusion.

Do you suppose that puppies love everything — running through flower patches, tumbling in the grass, howling at the moon — but that what they love most of all, because it tickles, is pooping? Dropping little puppy dumps in the vegetable garden?

When an elf bakes bread in the morning dawn at his little elf bakery in the tree-trunk, well I would bet that’s an extra cozy, scrumptious, feel-good affair.

When rabbits and cats get together, and have sex, there’s nothing strange or perverted about it; they are free spirits piloted by their feelings and revelling in the wonderful madness of love.

It’s cold and snowing outside, and dark; it’s very late in the year; the cocoa has just come off the stove and an amiable fire licks the back of the fireplace; you ease onto the couch with your mug and hardback — a hundred and seven pages of The Hours to go. Perfection? Almost. You may be sitting too close to the fire, because it’s getting uncomfortably warm. But you’ve just tucked your legs up on the cushion and positioned yourself just so against the pillows, so you hesitate to walk across the room and open a window. And just then, as if you had willed it, a fist-sized lump of cement comes crashing through the glass; a refreshing draft drifts in on its heels, and your eyes return to the page.

Hey! Hey, hey: what is better: skipping barefoot through a field of heather, cockscomb, and clematis as an evening sun melts on the horizon? Or finding out that an evening of fun with Heather, your slutty sister-in-law, whom you treated to the old cock’n’moan, didn’t catch you chlamydia?