Bing Cherries, by Mike Finley by Mike Finley

BING CHERRIES Essays by Mike Finley

Table of Contents Bing Cherries............................................................................5 Invisible Angels........................................................................8 Conversation with Aziz..........................................................10 The Greatest Arcade Hero Ever .............................................13 If I Gave a Sermon..................................................................16 Falling Trees...........................................................................21 One Big Happy ......................................................................23 A Spider's Strand ...................................................................26 Envy........................................................................................29 The Devil's Computer.............................................................33 Shook Foil ..............................................................................36 Dogolatry................................................................................41 Canine Wisdom .....................................................................44 Living Next Door to Lazarus..................................................46 The Blue Bicycle....................................................................51 Burntside.................................................................................54 The Return of the Runaway Bunny........................................57

Bing Cherries No sooner do I push my red shopping cart into the produce section of Cub Foods than I see a big display: BING CHERRIES $1.49 LB. A dozen people are milling around a mountain of cherries, separating the dark hard good ones from the lighter and mooshy ones. One forty nine, I think -- that's a pretty good deal. I used to run a fruit stand in the sixties, and even back then we often charged $1.69 for a pound. And that was before the Arab oil embargo. So I park my cart by the apples, grab a plastic bag, and begin filling it, taking care not to be as picky as everyone else seemed to be. I imagine the looks on my family's faces when I set a bowl of beautiful cherries on the table after supper. Oh, wow, they'll say appreciatively, cherries! It could happen. I return to the cart, set my cherries in it, and step away again, this time to examine those Gala apples from Chile. The price is good, but the apples look like they had a rough trip over the Andes, so I let that opportunity pass. I return to my cart, and push it idly out of the produce area, round the bend at the whole foods section, and am making my way past the fish and smoked sausage showcases when I notice something. There is something in my cart besides bing cherries. Leaning up against the inner wall of the cart is an aluminum walking cane, with a curved gray handle. My first thought is embarrassment. I have taken someone else's cart! Cripes, I can't let anyone know I've done this. Maybe I can sneak out the back way, and start over again at Rainbow Foods, just down the road.

But then my better self speaks up. Michael, you can't just ditch the cart. A cane is a prosthetic device. Someone back in the produce section needs it in order to ambulate. No matter how embarrassing, you owe it to that person to go back and return the cane. I exhale dramatically and push the cart back to the produce section. I want to get it back as soon as possible, so I hold the cane over my head, to attract attention. I scan the area with my eyes, my mouth open as if to ask, Did anyone lose a cane? "There it is!" a mean voice announces. I turn, and a very capable-looking frizzy-haired woman of about 75 is frowning at me. "Was this yours?" I ask miserably. She looks like she will club me with it when I hand it over. "Shame on you!" she says. "My friend is going out of her mind, thanks to you. Why would you do such a thing?" I hand the cane over, apologetically. "It was an accident. I had a cart with just cherries in it, and she must have had a cart with just cherries in it, too -- and the cane. I didn't see it until just now." "Well, you scared a poor old woman half to death. I hope you're proud of yourself," she says, and wheels away from me. That seemed a little unfair, but rather than plead my case I simply withdraw, hoping to get my day's worth of groceries and get the hell out of the store. I push my cart down the same route I have already traveled twice -- produce, whole foods, fish and smoked meats -- and a voice comes on the PA system: "Will whoever took a cart containing a cane in it, please return it to the customer service desk. We have someone here who is very upset about losing her cane." My heart sinks. I don't have to do this again, do I? Surely not. I toss a loaf of bread next to my bag of cherries, and push the 6

cart down through the deli section. When I round the corner, I see the mean frizzy woman bending over a stooped figure. It is an older woman, perhaps 86 or 88, and she can't be five feet tall, and she is staring into space and visibly trembling. The woman with her is rubbing her back and comforting her. She is saying something like, "It's all right, dear. We can come back later when you're up to it." The cane is in her cart. Oh, great, I say to myself, stepping back into the fray. "Ma'am," I say lightly, perhaps a foot from her face. "I'm the man who took your cane by mistake. I had cherries in my cart, just like you did. I just want to tell you I was very dumb to do it, and I surely did not mean to frighten you." The little woman lifted her face to me, and in less than a second I saw the most remarkable transformation, from a woman who has suffered many losses and reverses, and is reeling from this latest episode, to someone who knows it is her turn to do the right thing. "Oh, that's all right, sweetheart," she says, a bent smile wrinkling her face. "I make mistakes all the time," she said, to comfort me. I begin wheeling away, a little bit blissful from my moment of reprieve, when I hear the other woman clear her throat. I turn to see what she has to add to the scenario. Her weight on one foot, she glares at me with unforgiving eyes. "What about the cherries?" she wants to know.

Invisible Angels "Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." - Genesis 3

As we wade into the wetlands of the future, it might be wise to remember why we go forward -- why there even is a future. The origins of this notion are embedded in our most ancient stories. Most cultures -- not all, but most -- conceive of there once having been an age of gods, followed by an age of heroes, followed by our age of ordinary men and women. Evolution may be visible in the fossil record. But in the human imagination, we want the pattern to be devolution, a cosmic grace. Because that explains more than why we lack tails. It tells who we are, and what our world means. In the monotheistic tradition, humankind was created to be like God -- immortal, intelligent, without sin (taking on the prerogatives of God) but with the free will to sin. This golden age is a powerful preoccupation -- the good old days before pain and death. Our only hope of attaining anything like it again, we tell ourselves, is in the future. Dying and going to heaven is one way to get there, but few of us are in a hurry to do that. By far the preferred method is leveraging technology to remake the fallen world into a new Eden. When Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden, they knew nothing and had nothing. Imagine their desolation, having to overcome everything: Hunger. Ignorance. Disease. Powerlessness. Isolation. To survive they fashioned a toolbox of ambitious technologies: Agriculture. Literacy. Medicine. Mechanics. Networks. 8

Oddly, our sin was overstepping, wanting to be like gods -and our expiation for that sin was more overstepping, outfitting ourselves with godly technology. A single human being today, fully networked and plugged in, has 10,000 times the power and reach of Adam the instant he crossed Eden's threshold and the lights dimmed. So which is right, evolution or devolution? It's hard to doubt the fossil record, which suggests we descended less from angelic beings than from something analogous to e coli. (Maybe that's the dust we were fashioned from?) Or maybe scientists and creationists are both correct, and the clay comprising us is the residue of a universe bursting into being -- literal stardust -- a trillion millennia ago. Maybe, with the Weekly World News reports sighting Noah's ark on Mount Ararat, or the broken tablets in a cave at Qurun, the Cherubim are still stationed at the gates of Eden, flames still jetting from their swords. We could go there now, by plane and bus, and verify their vigil. But somehow -- because something about us makes paradise ring even truer than science -- we would be unable to see them.

Conversation with Aziz It was a bright afternoon. My son Jon and I were visiting our favorite upgrade shop in Prospect Park, Minneapolis. Jon, 11, likes running computer errands with me. Between us, tech talk passes for bonding behavior. We get lots of things done for our systems there -- memory, hard drives, motherboards, etc. The place is by guys who speak with Middle Eastern accents, but they are extremely sharp about their business. Accordingly, business is brisk. There are always a half dozen people at the counter lugging PCs to be fixed up. Our task today was to replace a burned out modem. I tried to attract the attention of the man behind the counter. Finally, a man who was working his way through the throng noticed Jon, lost among all the hardware. "Hello," he said, "who are you, and how may I help you?" "Jon Finley," my son muttered. "I'm sorry, what? How?" "My name's Jon Finley," he blurted. "We need a new modem. We've got a 33 bps modem but we want to get a 56k." "I see," said the man, stooping beside Jonathan, so they were on the same level. "Whose computer is it?" "Mine," said Jon. "Mine, what?" I asked him. "Mine, sir," Jon corrected himself. "What kind is it?" the man asked, unscrewing the case and peering inside. Jon rattled off the specs in megahertzes and megabytes. He characteristically did not make eye contact while he spieled off the acronyms. 10

The man smiled at him. "It's a powerful computer for one so young," said the man. "What do you do with it?" "Play games, mostly." "What kind of games?" Jon looked at me miserably. He knows his mother and I despair of the hours he spends online shooting people. "I'm playing a lot of Rainbow Six these days," he said. "That's a good game. I like to play that game. Yes, me! You know I have a son about your age. He is 10. He loves games, too." Jon was a little interested, but did not want to appear to be too interested. "What games does he like?" "He would like to play more shooting games. But I limit him. He is only allowed one hour per day. And only after he finishes his homework." I was warming to this man. "How does he like being limited? And how do you actually limit him?" The man looked up at me. "I have explained to Johar that a boy is like glass, innocent and fragile. Throw too much at a boy too soon, he will break. And once he breaks, he can never be put together again. So I am very careful. I have only one son." I looked at Jon. It was what I had been trying to tell him for the last couple of years -- only the man had said it much better. Jon frowned uncomfortably. "So how do you limit him?" I asked. "Do you have a timer? Some sort of software controls?" "No," the man said. "I tell him, from six o'clock until seven. And his homework must be completed first. He would not abuse the rule." I wanted to ask, Why not? Isn't it a given that whatever restrictions you place on a child, it is their bounden duty to 11

fudge the line? But I got the picture -- Johar didn't mess with his dad's rules. "Here," he said. "I have replaced the modem, and you can download files at 53k. Have fun -- but be careful," he said, wagging a finger. "Only download good things." I held out my hand to him. "Thank you, sir," I said. "And may I say I appreciated your insights into raising a son." "My name is Aziz," he said, taking my hand. "You know, the world is a furious place." He rolled his eyes, taking in the hubbub of the upgrade shop, everyone scrambling for a place at the counter. "But when you have a good son, like Jon, things seem simpler." And we loaded the PC into the trunk, and drove home. And Jon stared silently out the window, the boulevard trees reflecting against his face. And I reminded myself to spend more time watching him grow.

The Greatest Arcade Hero Ever The man stands behind the boy, observing him stalking down yet another corridor, laser gun in hand, intent on finding and meting out justice to alien malefactors. This is all on the computer, of course. The boy has been doing this for about five years. But today the man decides enough is enough. "I've got an idea," he says. "Let's come up with an arcade hero of our own. One that's better than these guys." The boy turns to him and blinks, adjusting to the light of the room. "How do you mean?" the boy asks. "Well, let's think it through. To create something different, first you identify what's normal. What do most online heroes do now?" "Mostly, they fight and kill things." "OK," the father says. "Then our hero will do the exact opposite. Instead of taking away life, our hero will give life, create life, cause life to flourish." "Like ET?" the boy asks. "You know, ET touches the dead flowers, and they come back to life. Or like the Genesis Project in Star Trek. One blast from the Genesis Bomb and life sprouts everywhere. It's got the power of making life out of nothing." "Excellent. This hero will have super powers of inspiration to restore life, to bring things back that are discouraged, or defeated, or feeling low. That's an excellent idea, by the way. ET made a ton of money. So what else would be different?" "Well, most heroes are always off on faraway adventures. That kind of hero is a visitor, a stranger."

"I see where you're going," the man says. "Our hero will be the opposite -- a hero who stays home, and does heroic things right there." "Right. Here's something else. Most heroes in these games, I've noticed, are not much better than the villains. Everybody just shoots everybody else." "So," the father says -- "our hero could be someone who interacts, and talks to people, maybe even brings out the best in them. Instead of blasting away, our hero could negotiate things. Find out what the bad guys really need, and see if there's a way to get them to stop being bad." "Wow." "In fact, the main thing about this hero is really caring, and having a gigantic heart, full of sympathy and understanding. A hero that could not just make you cheer, but could make you cry." "Oh, dad, that's really good. How about a something like in the Terminator, where the hero is totally dedicated to protecting others. Like, a hero that would die rather than let harm come to people." "Where loyalty becomes a superpower," the man says. "More powerful than a speeding locomotive. Leaps over tall builds with a single bound! Now here's the next thing. Lots of superheroes are invulnerable. Bullets bounce right off them. But how heroic is it if nothing hurts you? How about if we make our hero capable of being hurt?" "Yeah, that means our hero takes greater risks. And that takes courage." The boy nodded solemnly. The two jot ideas down right and left. To get more ideas, they think of movies they liked. "What's the scariest movie you ever saw?" the man asked the boy.

He frowned. "Alien, he says. "Where the creature grows inside the person's body, and when it's ready, it bursts out and kills the person." "Gross," the father says. "Well, let's do the opposite again. Let's let our hero be the host, that the creature grows inside. But instead of being a completely evil creature, make it a nasty creature that will grow and change and one day save the world. The man continues: "And the hero has to put up with the pain of this parasite, because the creature, who is very selfish and tyrannical now, will be really important one day. That's another superpower -- the willingness to suffer. The hero tolerates pain no ordinary person ever could tolerate. Because the hero's love is so great." The son puts his hand to his forehead and arches his eyes. "Dad, this would make such a sweet game," he says. "It is a sweet game," the man tell him. "Because everything we decided to call heroic is already happening right here in our house." The boy frowns. "Huh?" "You think about it," the father says. "Now go set the table for breakfast. Put out the good silverware. And give your mother a kiss."

Falling Trees You know the old riddle: Does a tree falling in the wilderness make a sound? I'm less Zen than that -- I wonder why it is that, after all the thousands of miles I have spent wandering around in the woods, I have never heard a tree fall. Not a one. Not even a limb of one. Do they wait until I'm gone, and then as soon as I'm out of the woods and turn my car radio on they let fall whatever was going to fall? A Texas man wrote me his story. His daughter Karen was one of five hikers in Oxbow Regional Park one Sunday in January, walking through a stand of old firs and stately cottonwoods along the Sandy River. “Karen had hurried ahead of her four friends and was walking in a sandy wash,” the news account said, “when a 150-foot-tall cottonwood tree behind her snapped and crashed to the ground. The rotted tree broke about 8 feet up its trunk and fell across the trail, striking Karen on the head and falling across her lower body.” The 24 year old woman who wanted to be a naturalist died instantly. “Trees do fall, Mr. Finley.” The father said. “I can attest to that.” The man paused. "Every night for a year I would pray for understanding. I calculate that that tree was about 150 years old, and that means it lived some 4 billion seconds in its life. "Now I ask myself. How could Karen travel all that distance, be so far from home, and be under that fateful tree in the one instant out of 4 billion that it falls down? Why did God want that? What did it mean?"

That father came to me and made me think. I'll bet he has raised this question to dozens of people since his daughter died. I had no answer for him beyond the usual human shrugs we offer one another as we try to understand how our lives play out in the hands of God. I have heard some wise things said about this, but I would be no wiser to repeat them here. As Job said, you don't split hairs with the whirlwind. All you can do is suffer, and pray you don't lose your faith, or your mind. I can think of several minor outcomes that are a blessing. Karen loved the forest, and had to travel from her home in East Texas to find one. She shared her love with a great many. And yes, she's gone, and it sure seems early. But she died doing what she loved. Many of us are less lucky than that. Many of us never even find what we love. But tragedy never rests with the person who dies. It is always in the hearts of those who are left behind, who are stunned and bewildered at the loss. We pray for souls departed, but the hunger for grace is right among us. Look into our stupefied eyes, and the tears forming there. Another way is that every death is a falling tree. Some unpredicted intervention that sweeps us away, and into God's arms. Trees falling in the wilderness do make a noise, a giant, thundering one. But the meaning of the fall is locked away silently in the human heart.

One Big Happy Happiness sounds like such a good thing. The birds singing. The band playing. The wind turning the pinwheel in a child's hand. I personally want to be happy all the time. And I do wish for every happiness for you and yours (although perhaps not quite as great as my own). Happiness seems to make us better people, judging from the looks on our faces. But is there enough happiness in the universe to go around? Is happiness a zero sum game: a finite commodity? Is there only so much to go around, a pie of measurable dimensions, albeit golden flaky crust? Jack Horner can pull out a plum, and so can several others, but eventually, doesn't the pie start having to issue plum scrip, IOUs for the next happiness the factory is able to ship? Arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there too many of us wanting to be happy, expecting to be happy or else, for us all to cash our happiness checks at the same moment? There is another way to consider the situation. I was raised to believe in miracles, to understand that a basket of bread and a string of fish can feed all Woodstock if the people but believe. This is elastic happiness. Like the Doritos commercial, God says, Be happy, I'll make more. But I look around some days, and I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see a multitude of seekers willing to share a picnic basket. More like a cloud of ravenous locusts, minus the teamwork, an Indianapolis 500 of gluttony and acquisition, swarming toward what we want and think we deserve, each of us determined to get ours, where "ours" is the most we can possibly get. A big fast car is a good metaphor for what we want -- ample room, high speed, indifferent gas mileage, status above ordinary people and separation from them, plus the ability to survive collisions with them. 18

When I read the Declaration of Independence and come across "the pursuit of happiness," I think what a country this is, that virtually guarantees happiness in the founding document of the nation. And I think of the founding fathers speeding back to their respective colonial capitals afterward, one by one in happy Humvees. I think some people turn to crime because they feel that they have been guaranteed happiness on TV and in magazines, and when it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come to them in the natural course of things, they grab the gusto whether it belongs to them or not. They rob and stalk and cheat because they have been told they are entitled to the good things in life. It is implied in every commercial. McDonalds doesn't sell hamburgers, it sells smiling families. Citicorp isn't after your wealth, it just wants you to nod in a secure, comfortable way. Kodak doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t document your vacation, it commemorates moments of peak happiness so you can refer back to them in occasional moments of doubt, and say, yes, that's how life really is. But, logically, these promises can't be kept. We can't all have ample space. There isn't enough elbow room for all our swinging elbows. Take a taxi ride through the slums of Calcutta, and ponder the happiness guarantee. I have a theory, and it is that The Establishment (that dark controlling power whose fault our intermittent moments of unhappiness is) knows there are not enough resources for us all to be happy, so it created celebrities. No, we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t all have Nicole Kidman, but Tom Cruise could, for a time. (And when she started to make him unhappy, or vice versa, they traded up to higher happiness.) Celebrities stand atop the pyramid of happiness, flashing capped smiles and enhanced body parts. They are stand-ins for the rest of us, and we curiously endorse this system, gobbling up all the news their press agents release to us, as if the lives portrayed, and the happiness attained, are somehow ours. 19

Midway down the pyramid are us Jack Horners, living lives of ersatz celebrity, driving big cars and mowing large lawns. Below us yawns Calcutta, where happiness comes not in this life but by purchasing it for the future with the misery of today. Buddhists and Christians agree that much of the cause of unhappiness is our very pursuit of it. That happiness devoid of virtue is fetishism, that happiness has no value unless other values are in place. At key intervals in our children's lives, Rachel and I have asked them what they think we wish for them -- that they live happy lives, that they be successful in their endeavors, or that they be good Jons and Dans. When they were children they unfailing answered "happiness," because so much evidence existed that that was what we hoped for them. We told them they were wrong. When they approached age 10 or so, they saw our other face, which prized performance and achievement, and opted for success. And we told them that, again, they were wrong. It wasn't until they hit 12 or 13 that they began to choose right. Maybe it was maturity, or maybe it was that there were no answers left. Without goodness in one's heart, without direction from God, happiness is thin and cheap, and success is neurotic. They get it now, and it is a sobering challenge to them, to develop on the inside instead of storing things up in bank accounts and on resumes. It means they must grapple with death, and failure, and deepest suffering. Some gift to pass on to the people you love most! Yet it's the greatest gift we could give, and their best chance in this life to know happiness.

A Spider's Strand What are those single strands of spiderweb you walk into in the woods? You just barely feel them brush your lip or on your nose. And you still feel them even after you brush them away. I know it's spider silk. It's the same material a web is made of, only it is a single strand stretched across the path, horizontally, at about chest level. Whenever I walk into one of these strands, I wonder two things. First, I wonder what the web's point is. If it's to catch some sort of living animal, large or small, wouldn't a conventional web be better than a single sticky strand? What kind of creature do you trap on a single strand? Maybe it's like those old westerns, where the director strung piano wire across a field to trip horses. The SPCA made them stop doing that. Second, how the heck does a spider string a strand of web across a path, four feet high on both ends? I can only imagine it in cartoon form: One cartoon has the spider plastering one end of the line on Trunk A, then hitching down the tree, hiking across the path on foot, climbing up Trunk B and then pulling all the slack out of the line until the line is taut, and plucking it -- toing! The other has the spider on Trunk A very intensely crouching, crouching, crouching, then leaping like a uncoiled spring -sproing! -- across the path, landing just slightly lower on Trunk B, panting like a Marathon winner. Having these questions about webs, I looked for an answer in the most logical place -- the World Wide Web. I looked up spiderwebs on various search engines. I asked Google, my search engine of choice, a simple plain-language question: "What's with those spiderwebs you walk into in the forest?" Google, you don't have a clue. 21

This bugged me mightily, because I walk a lot, and I walk through scores of these webs every day. I need to know if it's something I should worry about, or if it's just one of those things. This past weekend I got my chance. I was at an open house at a state park interpretive center. I asked a woman serving coffee and cookies if there was a naturalist in the building. I was going to find answers the old fashioned way -- by asking other human beings point blank. "I'm a naturalist," she said. She didn't look like a naturalist, but she seemed to think she was one. So I asked her. "Oh, those are spiderwebs," she said. "What kind of spider?" I asked. She frowned. "Tree spiders?" I was going to ask her why these "tree spiders" made the webs, but I thought better of it. I wandered around the center for a few minutes, then ducked into the men's room. I stepped up to the urinal, and there was an older man next to me. I noticed little bugs flying around the porcelain. "Wow," I said -- "urinal gnats!" The old man peered over to see. "That's OK," I said. "You don't need to look." "I couldn't help overhearing you out there," the old man said, staring forward now. "Those are little spiders, and they use their web strands to swing from tree to tree. They let out a little line, catch a breeze, and there they go." "Like Tarzan," I said. He nodded. "If Tarzan could sprout vines on demand out of his bellybutton." "So it's transportation," I said, "not entrapment." He nodded again.

"That's good, because I was wondering how many of those strands I would have to walk through before I was all trussed up and ready to serve." "Quite a few, I'd say," the old man snickered. "Quite a few." "So what kind of spiders would you say these are?" "Tree spiders," the old man said, squinting. So they were in it together. I wondered, How deep did the conspiracy run? And what exactly were they covering up?

Envy Are there people in your life you compare yourself to negatively? Mine is Garrison Keillor. I used to know Garrison a bit. He worked in Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota's West Bank campus in the 1970s, at the same time I was doing a public affairs TV show called "Future Shoes." He was already a big deal even then, as the host of KSJN's "Morning Program," though he was only a few years my senior. There was something about the guy. To begin with, that terrific voice, like a Lutheran pump organ that knows ever hymn by heart. I was an occasional narrator on my little show, and it pained me to hear what I sounded like. Wise-assed and whiny about sum it up. Though so expressive in his work, Garrison had little inperson personality. I rode up and down on the elevator a few times with him. After the first efforts at hello, I gave up on him. He was in the clouds, and not of this world. On his show he calls it shy, but it really did come across to me as aloof. Of course, I don't know what it felt like on the other side. In those days I was a University media jock by day and a surrealist poet after hours. From time to time Garrison came to a poetry reading in the basement of the Unitarian Church on Mount Curve Avenue and brought some long, loping, comedic thing, very similar to his later Lake Wobegon monologues. I thought they were skilled, but lacked verbal fireworks. Later I came to see now that he trying for emotional, not language fireworks. Where I was trying to make splendid noise, he was more like Bing Crosby, in search of the perfect modulation. It is curious that this most unintimate man formed such an intimate vapor-seal with his audience. I know I hang on every syllable, after twenty years.

I'll bet he had no opinion of me whatsoever, even that I existed, as a fellow poet, fellow University media guy, or just a fellow face in the brute, lowing crowd. I was even a guest at his house once, in Saint Anthony Park, around 1974. I played softball in a nearby field with a team made up of his radio and music friends. I played second base and handled everything that came to me. Our team that day wore fedoras instead of ball caps. I don't know why, but it created a certain noir effect. I came this close to having a word with him that day ("Hello again?") but it did not come to be. Later, in 1979, I was invited out to Worthington to be news editor of the Daily Globe, and Garrison was friends (on some arcane level) with my publisher (and Garrison's former classmate in John Berryman's famous poetry proseminar) Paul Gruchow. It was Gruchow who finagled a "Prairie Home Companion" show out there, and Keillor was in great form by then, having single-handedly reestablished American music as a genre, and raising up a generation of folkie stars like Greg Brown and Peter Ostroushko. By then I had ceased being a surrealist poet and was hankering to be a folksy country editor type of poet. I wrote a book that was never published called Borrowing from Minneapolis to Pay St. Paul, which I still think is a great title, but I don't think I will ever make money from. But the world already had Garrison, and if Garrison were to fall, Gruchow would surely pick up the standard. I didn't appear anywhere in the sequence of succession. And it was starting to dawn on me that in the great literary competition of my generation's hearts and minds, my destiny was to be a very marginal figure. I kept trying new things, rising early every morning for thirty years and writing my ass off before the first cock crew. And Garrison kept working his thing, not altering the formula a whole lot, but maintaining an exquisite level of quality

through those same three decades, him succeeding and being the darling of crowned heads, and me just mainly typing. At one point, I was called in by Minnesota Monthly to do an emergency rewrite of a Keillor profile that had gone seriously a-gley by a too-worshipful New York-based writer. It was yeoman's work, dulling the knife's-edge of praise in the original, and reminding readers of Garrison's various feuds with the media (this before Gov. Ventura). I even went into folk music for about four years, working with the Minnesota Folk Festival as volunteer and board member and even sometimes as onstage ringmaster for a couple of their events. I remember being nervous at the microphone, and feeling a couple of my impromptu, vaguely Keillor-like bits fall horribly flat. He -- or a part of him, as I proved I am no impresario -- was what I wanted to be. A gentle, darkly humorous commentator on America, hiding behind the Lutheran bushes of Minnesota orthodoxy. So urbane, so successful. I have a writer friend -- we will call him Dewayne -- who pooh-poohs the idea that Garrison Keillor is any kind of competition,. Which doesn't make me feel any better. He says Keillor is no heavyweight, so why should I worry about him? As if I were a heavyweight. As if I wouldn't be even more envious of, oh, Thomas Pynchon or Umberto Eco. No. I am stuck with the Richard Corey Solution: to hope Garrison has suffered a lot in his private life, and that additional excruciating pain awaits him in the future, with his audience forswearing him. I'll tell you, it almost came to be. A few winters ago we began attending an Episcopal church in Crocus Hill, and the very second time we attended, in came a hunched over Keillor, still woozy from (I think) heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic.

I couldn't help but peer over at him through the ceremony. Rachel and I were impressed -- Garrison Keillor, at our church of two long weeks! And an Episcopal one, which was odd. One might have expected him to be as Lutheran in life as he is on the stories he combs from the air. He was alone in his pew, and he doddered a bit. He lifted no prayer book, sang no hymn. He looked like a man who had recently spent time in hell, and was hoping to grab an hour's respite. And afterward, as we filed out, Frank, our minister, was so moved by Garrison's painful grimace that he embraced him -lightly -- in the alcove. And Garrison, who I think would have recoiled like an asp at this in any normal circumstance, had to stand there and take it like a man.

The Devil's Computer I didn't really have time to hear another of young Wormwood's passionate presentations. Our soul quota for the millennium was still unmet, and it was already 1999. But since he's my nephew, I humored him. This time, his mania was all about individual computing machines. The boy is only two million years old, and as green as copper flame. I sat him down in the visitor's chair and listened to his spiel. "Uncle Screwtape," he said, clearing his throat, "the computing machines, and the Internet they speak to, enable every person to communicate with every other person, but behind a gauze of their own making. "You can say anything you want, be anything you want," Wormwood said. "Everyone pretends to be respectable, and have wonderful credentials. It is a liar's paradise. No one has a clue what the truth is any more." "Really?" I said. "I had no idea the computing machines had this potential. I thought we created them as a way to mess up people's phone bills and paychecks." "Much has happened since then, uncle. The machines can go anywhere and do anything now." "Give me examples," I said. "Very well. It is possible to use the Internet to locate someone else's work, download it, and then present it to others as your own. Children around the world are getting other people to do their homework. Copyrights are being ignored. Theft has become the global pastime." "I like," I said. "Tell me more." "Very well. Because users donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually see one another, they are emboldened to become very angry, and they shout at one 28

another using their machines. If someone says something you disagree with, you can be as rude as you want. You'll adore the phrase they give this, uncle: flamewars. "People are swindling one another routinely in a wide variety of online scams -- chain letters, get rich quick schemes and phony stock reports. Greed is epidemic. No one wants to do honest work any more! Obsession and isolation reign. "There are even people who spend their entire lives thinking of ways to annoy others using these machines. They call their business spam, after a compote of swine gelatin. I think you would like them. "Who would have thought that these machines created for work would become the primary movers of pornography. People who ordinarily would work hard are instead downloading pictures of other undressed humans and examining them on company time. "Husbands are cheating their wives, and single people who should be dating are frittering away courting years, addicted to naughty pictures, forgetting what they really need in a mate -friendship, loyalty, and support. "Some people flip out entirely, and stalk one another online. It's deliciously twisted! "Then there's the children. With all the pornography sloshing around, kids are inevitably exposed to the most degraded images and enticements. Let me tell you, once they see this stuff, we've got our hooks in them for a lifetime. And beyond! "The best part is, the machines donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work all that well. Every now and then, we flip a switch down below, and cause someone's computing machine to fail -- for no good reason. Oh, if you could hear the wonderful cursing and blasphemy that ensues! "Before I forget, uncle, there's a company there called Microsoft that makes software for these machines that is doing

such great work, we really ought to consider some sort of merger." "Noted," I said. "In conclusion," the boy said, "the computing machine is a godsend for our retrieval operation. People are wadding up their souls and tossing them away without the bother of yesterday's legalistic mumbo-jumbo, contracts in blood, and the rest. "And they never know what hit them. They never actually choose. Things that once mattered simply stopped mattering. All sense of connection, one soul to another, is lost. All sense of underlying purpose is erased. "The pitchfork," he declared, "is obsolete." I rose from my studded chair and stood a moment in silent recognition of his feat. "My boy," I said, "you bring tears to these red old eyes." "Oh, and I left out the best part," Wormwood said, with a wicked grin. "Prices keep falling."

Shook Foil Tony, a friend of mine, died this week, after a long, gruesome illness. For twenty three years Tony suffered from multiple sclerosis. Toward the end it took from him almost everything he had. He could not walk or even work his hands. He ate through a tube in his stomach. He got severe respiratory infections and bed sores. He couldn’t speak except in sighs and moans (which I could never quite decipher, and had to figure out a way to respond to). He was, medically speaking, demented. Because of this he also lost his wife and children, who stopped coming by. It was just too painful. Tony understood. He grieved, but he understood. Tony and I were seminarians as boys, back in the early ‘60s when the Catholic Church still sent 14 year olds to begin study for the priesthood. We didn’t go to the same school – we discovered this fact about one another when we became roommates as adults. This doesn’t mean Tony and I were great friends. Former seminarians are a peculiar class of people – we carry with us a sense of washing out, but also a sense of having been close to something amazing. Seminary was a remarkable experience. We used to rise at 5:30 in the morning, silently, and walk through the dark to chapel with our classmates. There we would kneel on hard wood, and blink up at the tabernacle. I can’t say what Tony felt, but I felt like I could not be closer to God, kneeling with all those yawning boys. We were so fair and cherry-cheeked. I contrast that with the haggard look I saw on Tony in his final years. He had lost all the muscle in his arms and legs, and his hair hung like scraggly straw. He became very eccentric, and occasionally very angry. By his own admission, he was “crazy.” 31

Does God give us more than we can handle? I used to think yes, but Tony, from the wreckage of his existence, managed to convince me otherwise. He lived for five years with a nursing home roommate who also couldn't talk, who was also demented, who was also given to fits of screaming and weeping. Yet when that roommate died, Tony was inconsolable -- he loved that broken man so much. Tony loved Jesus more than you think it would be possible, in a joyous, weeping, delirious way. He could barely put his hands together, but he embraced his Bible sometimes every moment of the day. He loved getting phone messages. Although he couldn’t talk on the phone, he used to play and replay them until he sucked the marrow from every morpheme. And here’s something you wouldn’t expect. He read. Lots. He read a book practically every day. And he played cribbage. In the last year of his life he was a cribbage monster, defeating everyone in the nursing home, including the orderlies. Whenever competition was afoot, Tony rallied his resources. He made sure he won, one way or another. Cheating was not totally beyond him. I myself had gone many years without seeing Tony, when his brother Clete suggested I give him a call. So I dialed the nursing home number, figuring a nurse would answer, or Tony’s answering machine. Now, I must tell you, I was afraid. Tony could be really weird and I figured he would be antagonized by the voice of a fellow seminarian stopping by to be “charitable.” So I had to summon courage just to dial the phone. The plan was to leave a voice message. Read an inspiringsounding thought into the tape, then cut and run. But it didn't work out that way.

Instead, after a full minute of fumbling and voices in the background ("Here, let me help you") I know I have a line to Jim. Since Tony couldn’t talk, I had to do all the talking, so did. “Hello, Tony, this is an old friend. I know you can’t guess who I am, so I won’t try and make you. This is Mike Finley. Remember, from the house on Superior Street?” No answer, just loud breathing. “Well, I saw Clete and his little girl the other day at the dentist’s, and we talked about you, and I thought I’d give you a call.” Only breathing as response, but it had an interested quality about it, as in the phrase “bated breath.” I caught him up a bit with my life, my kids, and work. But I didn’t go into a lot of detail – family being a sore point for him. “You know, we’re all doing pretty good, busy with school and work.” I had run out of things to say, and now, in addition to hearing Tony’s breathing, I could hear my own in my ear. I sounded frightened. I said a little prayer, asking for calm, and the right thing to say. And I reached for a book I kept in a desk drawer. “Tony, I’m going to read something to you, and I’m betting you’ll recognize it from seminary. It’s the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the poem is called “God’s Grandeur,” and the poem has always amazed me by finding words and images to suggest something we have such a hard time expressing. I want to read it just for you, Tony, because I know you love God.” And before I started to read, my fear melted away. And I found myself pausing to explain what the poem was about. “Now, this is what English professors mean by a difficult poem, Tony. You remember what that means. It means you

have to think about the words. And sometimes, read them over again, and that’s what I am going to do.” And that’s what I did, stopping to translating some of the phrases and underscoring the really meaningful ones. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

“Isn’t that amazing, Tony? The world is charged. I picture a cable of high voltage held up to our lives, and God sizzling through the wire.” Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:

“Do you hear that, ‘trod and trod’ – can’t you hear how hard it is for all of us to go forward. Seared, bleared, smeared – what words to describe this imperfect life!” And all through the chat I could hear Jim's gasping and sighing. He wanted me to know when a phrase or moment worked for him, and I got the drift. the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

“Tony, I get shivers thinking how nature is never spent, how this freshness courses underneath us every instant, always there for us to tap into.” And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

When I finished, Tony and I just hung on the line for a few minutes. I could hear the breath in his airways. And while he 34

could not speak to me, I felt this call was very interesting to him. He was thanking me, even though he knew it was a “pity call.” But I was the thankful one. Somehow that book peeked out at me from deep in my drawer. I remembered liking it, but hadn’t read it in years. But what a glorious thing it was, the idea of God’s grace lighting up the world like shook foil, even in the midst of awfulness. I always have thought I was a pretty clever fellow. But our conversation was like a shipwreck, and then this poem appeared in my hands. Tony turned out to be the one with imagination. He led me through it. He was the man. Somehow, strapped to his bed, the picture of misery, unable to even dial a phone, he locked onto me, and made me feel God’s true grandeur.

Dogolatry Last week Reverend Phil watched disapprovingly as I wielded the kitchen cleaver. “People are hungry in Sao Paolo, and you’re frying steak for your dog,” he said. I stopped and stared at the meat. Phil was right on. It was disproportionate. How was it that a dog should eat better – much, much better -- than a child? “And that’s just for starters,” Phil said. “You walk your dog three times a day. My dog gets one walk. The rest of the time, I’m out doing God’s will. You treat that dog like a graven idol.” Now, that was uncalled for. It’s true, I do walk my dog Beauregard three times per day. Worse, he is a French poodle, the big kind, one of the most querulous of breeds, and he exhibits no gratitude for this or any other kindness. I can’t read a dog’s mind, but I suppose his attitude is one of entitlement. Which I suppose is how most idols feel. I admit it: if I were out in the world doing good works from dawn to dusk, three walks would be hard to fit in. But I’m a writer. Writers and good works are separate universes. It’s not like, if the dog dies, I will be out donating blood or delivering meals. Just being honest. My dog wouldn’t know goodness if it bit him. He seems to know that he cost me $600 upfront, and another $70 every three months for a haircut. He is a very dominant creature, and seems to feel that other dogs have put on earth for him to lord it over. I don’t help matters much by letting him run loose through the neighborhood, inflicting himself on his ethical betters.

But seriously, I ask you to think of this on a deeper level. I use Beau the way people who have real jobs use coffee breaks. Every three hours or so, they get up and they move around a bit and refresh themselves. When I do this with Beau – walking him through the ‘hood -- it is really more for me than it is for him. But he doesn’t know that, and I’m trusting you not to tell him. When I walk my dog a good thing happens, spiritually. I relax and see the actual world I am living in, not the wallpaper inside my head. In this sense, walking Beau is an invitation to reflection, meditation and prayer. We go down to the river in spring to watch the Mississippi rush by. In the summer I pull ticks from his ears, and coax him to stay in, or get out of the tent, on or the other, make up your mind. We walk in the tall woods in the fall, leaves tumbling like pages of the calendar slipping away. I watch big snowflakes land on his black hide in the winter, and him grinning as he disappears in the gathering white, just like a Cheshire dog. My French dog takes himself so seriously, forever seeking advantage in every situation. His pretensions and selfabsorption make me laugh a dozen times a day, and maybe ease my own pretensions and self-absorption just a little. When I see Beau I sometimes think of him as being my soul, my own inner spirit. Surely they are similar, being both so full of yearning and devotion, so childlike in the face of their respective masters. Think of your soul that way, as a dog who wants only to run free and dwell in the master’s yard, warding imposters away. A soul that is full of faith (“Call me Fido”) and certain only of his alliance with you, an alliance so precious he will surrender his life for it. Why would I not want to look such a soul in the eyes three times a day, and remind myself of his everyday beauty and the 37

limitless love he feels toward me? Who would not take care to keep such a soul alive and warm, and well-fed, and well walked? They say that God finds you where you are, and takes you on those terms. What better opening for me than through this supercilious soul who follows me from room to room, as solemn as a king, wagging his tail behind him like a flag?

Canine Wisdom "Hey dad," my daughter said, opening Beau's mouth. "Look at this." The dog had broken a tooth off and the stump had turned gray. I felt a pang when I saw the broken tooth. My pup is getting older. I patted the standard poodle -- he's the big fella, at 65 pounds -- on the head. He blinked, Keatonlike, with the impact of each pat. Old Beauregard: the words belonged together, just as Young Beau did. I thought of his prancing youth, and the joy I felt walking him through the neighborhood. I used to sing "Little Deuce Coupe" to myself. Beau was my hotrod, with flame decals and mag wheels. That rod ran a lot of races. When he was one, he got in a tussle with a RottweilerDoberman mix down under the Lake Street Bridge. For his part, Beau was being theatrical, all fangs and snarls -- he certainly looked scary. But the other dog, more practiced at this sort of thing, or bred to it for a thousand generations, casually executed him, chomping through Beau's jugular. I had to climb a cliff, dragging the bleeding dog behind me, and rush off to the vets. Got him neutered the same day, to keep him out of the next fight. It helped. Some. Half a year later, one rainy Monday Night halftime, Beau chased a rabbit under the rear wheel of a Vanagon. The car ran over his left forearm. When I lifted him in my arms he bit at me savagely, with fierce jabbing bites, out of fright. Four months of recovery, a painful pin connecting his broken bones. Even when he was â&#x20AC;&#x153;all better,â&#x20AC;? you could see arthritis had moved into the joint, and minutely slowed each step.

His ears hurt him. Standard poodles have moist, twisty ear canals that bacteria grow in, and when they take over, misery results. I remember him walking to me with his head at a strange angle, as he tried to contain the pain. Ignorantly, I over-medicated him, spilling bottle after mottle of different herbal goos into the infected area, until he wanted to shriek from pain. I had to have him anesthetized to scoop out the mess I made inside. When he was young I used to complain he was not "giving" enough. Beau was a vain, self-centered clown who never looked beyond his own needs. Whereas I wanted a dog that was like an angel, showering you with silent blessings, I got the Curly Pimpernel. We reached a turning point one day. I was just getting out of the hospital after outpatient knee surgery. My wife Rachel staggered me into the living room and dumped me on the couch. I looked like Jack Nicholson after his lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nest. But my last memory before closing my eyes was of Beau by my side, licking my wound in long, deliberate strokes. The selfish creature was trying, like a doctor with all his instruments arrayed before him, to fetch me back to life. And now look at you, with your broken tooth, and the streaks of gray showing up in your famous coat. I lift your muzzle in my hand, and point your face toward mine. Canine wisdom -it's more than two kinds of teeth. It's the two of us drawing closer over the long leisure of years, like a walk in a golden, waving field.

The Blue Bicycle The snowy woods at Hidden Falls echoed with the crunch of boots and the snapping of dry wood. "How much longer?" my 8-year old son Jon asked. "Not long," I said, huffing frosted steam. "We're almost there." My 12-year old daughter Daniele was impatient, too. "What did you say we were looking for?" "Yes," Rachel said, "what is it exactly?" "Something you'll never see again," I said. I was in heaven, luring my kids out into the cold to see if they could spot the remarkable thing. We finally came to a clearing overlooking a small ravine. We just stood there for a moment, our breath frosting up before us. "It's right here," I announced. There wasn't a sound except the subtle poof of huge snowflakes landing. Then Jon said, "I see it!" He pointed up, into the lower reaches of a young cottonwood tree. There, about ten feet from the ground, was a rusted old bicycle. It was not sitting in a branch; rather, the branch had somehow grown around the bicycle. The main bar was entirely enclosed in swarming wood. "Wow," Daniele said. I had come across it a few days earlier, out walking the dog. I had actually passed that spot a hundred times and not noticed. But who ever looks up to see a tree embracing a bicycle? You need luck to see these things. And now I felt like Merlin, 41

letting young Arthur peer into a peculiar mystery. Based on the bike style, the amount of corrosion, and the absence of tire rubber, I guessed that the bicycle had been in the tree for over 40 years. It was entirely rusted except for a narrow path of etched blue enamel just below the handlebars, by the little plate that still said Western Automatic. The four of us were suddenly giddy with the idea of a bicycle growing in a tree. How did it get there? Did someone lean it against the tree years ago, and the tree slowly reached out and lifted it up, an inch a year, up into the sky? Or did someone just throw it up there, and the tree held onto it and grew around it? Whose bike was it, and would its owner remember it? Did the bike think it was flying? Did the tree think it was riding? Did the wind once blow the wheels around, whispering stories of locomotion to the stationery tree? Everyone agreed, on the way back to the car, that it was a wonderful thing, and we should always keep our eyes keen for other anomalies. They must be everywhere, we reasoned. We just have to train ourselves to see them. But the next time I came to the clearing, in spring, by myself, not only was the bicycle gone -- but the tree itself gone. A big wind blowing up the river has no trouble toppling trees rooted in sand. A cottonwood lay on its side like that, head down in the ravine, its roots reaching up like imploring hands. I looked around for the bicycle. I scouted the area, to no avail. The spring vegetation was already crowding the ground â&#x20AC;&#x201C; thick enough to hide a jutting pedal or rusted rim.

Over the next couple of years I gently obsessed about finding the bicycle, returning to the spot numerous times, to see if I had merely misplaced it. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed it. But it was just a curl of riverbank vine, pretending to be wheel, or the color of rot pretending to be rust. My heart always quickened when I stood on that spot. A bicycle fashioned of iron from the dirt once roamed this city and raced up and down its hills. Its rider was thrilled to fly through our town. And then the bicycle took up residence, in some unexplained way, high in a tree overlooking the Mississippi, gazing out at the barges and crows. And now it had returned to the earth. I felt like that archeologist, Schliemann, who found Troy seven cities down, only in reverse. What the earth lifted up, it then took back. Everything combined to make it so. Every falling leaf hid it. Each clump of snow buried it deeper. Every summer hiker's footfall sank it deeper in the wood. It all goes. My children are grown. But I saw a bicycle ride through the sky, its wheels still turning in the breeze from the river.

Burntside From the outside, the chimney atop the old camp sauna glows red from the fires within. In the moonlight, a sheet of snow covers the lake and dusts the surrounding trees. But there is no snow anywhere near the sauna cabin. Inside, a furnaceful of men who accept the fire yet are not burned. Like Shadrach, Meshak, and Abednego, they sit, they sweat, they slap, they melt. They die a little and are reborn. He did not want to go to the lake this weekend. Money is tight. Deadlines are murder. The world is a mess. He feels stressed out, and needs time to whimper. Even his dog, whom he betrayed to the kennel with a kiss, became insecure around him, licking and licking and licking. The prospect of driving up to Burntside Lake seemed only to add to his woes. But neither was he strong enough to put his foot down and say No, I will not go north, I will not go through the ice, I will not restore my aching spirit, now leave me alone! Instead, he went up grudgingly, daring bleak wilderness to grant him repose. Sometimes he thinks of a prayer from an old poem: Lord, send my roots rain. But instead of rain he gets steam. His friend Ethelred invited him to the camp sauna just before midnight. Three rows of benches accommodate naked 16 men. As late arrivals they become straphangers, standing naked in the flickering shadows. The furnace casts some light, but the air is so hot you can't study faces without frying your eyeballs. Best to draw your lids low, and cast your countenance downward. Two local men are talking about acetylene equipment. Another group mutters about the physics of saunas. A youth is sitting on the lowest bench, his head buried in his hands, as if

he has confessed to some mortal crime. Really, he cannot cook with his elders. A legacy man â&#x20AC;&#x201C; been coming since 1958 -- says that the sauna house was built in 1913 by a team of Finns shipped over from Finland. The furnace cracks and needs replacement every year or so, so hot is the crucible. Every ten minutes or so a clothed man enters, taps the temperature gauge and calls out the conditions: 193 degrees, 204 degrees, finally 210 degrees. It is too hot in here now to live. With a tilt of the head Ethelred and he agree they have had enough and bolt out the door, skittering like men in chains down the ice-crabbed runway to the cracking waters of Burntside Lake. Astonishingly, the thing he most dreaded -- the heated cup shattering as it is dipped in cold -- becomes the thing most welcome. It is like going from salamanders one moment, flashing red among the embers, to sea lions the next, racing under the blue. From Purgatory and atonement, to being at one with God in Paradise. It is all a man ever is, from the clamber to birth to the experience of love, from death in battle to taking oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seat in the hall of the gods. The moment of reincarnation must be like this, when the soul sloughs off one tattered jacket and slips into the next silky one. It is not brains thinking now, it is every cell from every organ, the elbow and intestines are finally getting their say, each fenced-in yard scoured and refitted, a trillion bags of oxygen bursting in the body. And as he stands looking north, though dusted tall pines trees block the view to the arctic lights, he feels the colors flashing inside him, rose and silver, turquoise and white, man rising though ice and fire.

Of course it's temporary. Life does not stop being life. The cycle continues, up, down. Bright lights will give way to dull blues. A man steps in front of a mirror and sags. Reality, or what passes for reality, will return. But for the moment, he who was so recently beaten is beautiful.

The Return of the Runaway Bunny In Margaret Wise Brown's children's story The Runaway Bunny, the bunny child threatens to leave his loving mother. It is not clear why the little bunny needs to run away. He hurls his ultimatums at her, not cruelly, but softly, as a matter of fact, as if this is what children must do. As if there could be nothing more fulfilling and fun than breaking a loving mother's heart. First the bunny threatens to turn into a fish and swim away. “If you run after me, I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.” The mother replies that if he does that, the mother will turn into a fisherman, and she will snatch the baby up in her net. No matter what the baby does, the mother will follow after, and do what she needs to do. She will not permit the baby bunny to escape. The bunny child makes subsequent threats. It will become a crocus in a secret garden. It will be impervious, a rock on the side of a steep mountain. It will disappear from the mother’s life, and never be found again. Each time, the mother reassures the bunny child that it’s no use. Whatever the child does, wherever he goes, the mother will find him. Because that is what loving mothers do. The story is one grown-ups fall in love with even as it strangely touches the hearts of children. Because it describes a feeling parents can scarcely express, a craziness in us that we will do anything, go anywhere, because of the fathomless love that we feel. It is something the baby can never understand. It is a love that is unnegotiable and inescapable and absolute. It is a love that pours out like an overflowing faucet, that fills the sink and continues to flow until all the furniture in the room is floating.

This love is a force so limitless as to be supernatural, like the uncanny posse in that movie, that followed Butch and Sundance over every mountain and every stream, and after a week of their nonstop running was only a half day's ride behind. And you want to say with them, just like in the movie, Who are these guys? How can they keep their promise to follow everywhere, anywhere, and do what needs to be done? It is eerie and unreasonable. It makes no sense to deploy such skills for the likes of me. And it is humiliating that no matter what the little bunny does -- whether it is testing the mother's love or whether it really and truly does hope to hide from her light, find refuge for myself in this world -- it will fail, because its childlike desires are up against something vastly more powerful, immeasurably more intense. It is the realization that I as little bunny can swim to the outer reaches of space but it is futile because you, my loving mother, will always find me, you will always be there, and I will never be alone, never be free, you will always trump me. It never matters what I want. I remain your slave whether I flee from you or not. To that part of me which seeks only to be alone, to be away from you, this is the most awful truth, because there is no denying it. And the mother knows her little bunny is genuinely fearful of this love. For anything that loving and that fervent is frightening. It is of an order that no child's mind can comprehend or set limits to. How can you be this way to me? you want to ask. How can you venture this foolish guarantee? Don't you know how the world really works, that it is not driven by love but by selfishness and fear?

That little bunnies are shaken every day by dogs? That the innocent and unwary are run over by cars as they cross a simple street? Don't you know that untreated and uncared for, little bunnies break out in sores, that parasites chew through us, that we die bawling and whimpering and alone? And that the mothers we cry out for never come forward, cannot find us, cannot take us in their arms? How can it be, then? How in the face of this obvious truth about the big world, that the slightest glance at a newspaper makes plain, can the mother bunny make this ridiculous promise? What fairy tale mind believes this boast? But the mother bunny rocks and rocks, the baby bunny close in her arms. It's an allegory, she explains. I am God's love, which will pursue you no matter where you run. Though the world is full of terrible things, believe in me, and we will walk through this time, and be together after that.

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