1 minute read
Peter Neil Carroll
Falling in Love
Is it the tree that catches the light or a red-breasted robin that rubs the buds to sprout. Six days before Valentine’s, the birds are back, zipping from Magnolia’s fruit to the chartreuse willow branch, first to nibble on, then to digest and recall the spontaneous pleasure finding itself reflected in the glass at my front window, cooing to that stranger cooing back, and selfishly I think it had fallen in love with me, as another romantic robin had done last year, remembering what my religious neighbor once said, you can fall in a hole, but not in love. Welcome home my near-sighted bird.
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Peter Neil Carroll
The Gunfight (4/10/20)
It’s the greatest movie ever made my pal Michael announces, naming a cowboy picture, The Ballad of somebody whose name I never heard, which would have been the end of the story but these days in confinement looking for a break in the boredom, I find the movie streaming—an escape into the mythic west, the saga of a singing gunslinger, who winds up in a gun duel with another blustering killer in the middle of Main Street in a dusty cowboy town—
Unlike the usual Bang-Bang scenes, the fastest gunman does not kill his rival, but shoots off his trigger finger, halting the loser in his tracks, then with a ceremonial twist fires four more shots, each removing a single finger from that one hand, leaving five stumps before the villain is sent to eternity—
and now I realize why Michael likes this movie, a reenactment of his view of the world, not as a singular calamity but a thousand small ones, nibbling at the edges of life, not tragedy, but daily weird annoyances— power failures, computer crashes, billing mistakes—that provoke feelings of helplessness and rage, a realist he is, ever wise, ever wacko.
