crdahlberg

Little Slivers

An army of California freeway motorcyclists, the “lane splitters,” legally ride the no-man’s-land between lanes. When motorists encounter a Harley on the lane-that-is-no-lane, they may suffer violently erupting blood pressure and heartbeats outpacing those of a guinea pig.

A Harley can pump out 120 decibels, enough untamed quaking to redirect the veins in an eyeball. And the heart-stopping noise and sheer shock of an unexpected motorcyclist blasting on slivers of highway, mere inches away, can generate PTSD symptoms.

Tiny slivers can draw disproportionate attention. Take my left big toe. The toenail’s edge, a tiny sliver, grows crooked and inward. Only a sculptor could appreciate the nail’s insidious geometric angle. This minuscule anatomical anomaly, doubtless the vestige of an ancestor’s aberrant DNA, creates piercing pain. The throbbing torment rivals the earsplitting Harley gobbling up its sliver of freeway.

Other kinds of slivers carve consequential geopolitical landscapes. The city of Kaliningrad lies 412 miles westward from the rest of Russia, a vestige of World War II politics. It is an isolated political sliver encircled by other countries. The Suez Canal is another geographical sliver. That tiny navigable sliver eliminates long voyages around the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The canal reduces the journey by 5,500 nautical miles, or 220 fewer days at sea. The Panama Canal, another watery sliver, saves 8,000 nautical miles for ships sailing between the east and west coasts of the United States.

Our appreciation of, or annoyance at, slivers can play into our personal aspirations. We are hard-boiled in a pot of anti-sliver diatribe. To carve out a well-lived life, we are coached to create outsized achievements. Slivers be damned! We can become whatever we may dream, pole-vaulting over monstrous obstacles in our way. We measure our worth by powering our ambitions up the steepest inclines.

There must be a better way forward, a counterpunch to the gold-medal worthy mandates of a bigger, better, faster world. Have we overlooked the unnoticed, shadowed backwaters concealing Little Slivers of a different scale?

The July 19, 2024 issue of The New York Times carries an article about a tribe, the Maduro people, living deep in the vast expanse of the Amazon rain forest. This year, their tribal meetings would be held in a village 13 miles distant, beyond thick forest, logs, and streams. Attending the meeting would be a near-impossibility for the tribe’s oldest member. She had lost track of her age, but it’s somewhere between 106 and 120. Despite having never worn shoes, and refusing to do so, she vowed to make the trek.

We are brought low or grow tall depending on our navigation of the challenges in our path. Only the old woman’s son could create the way forward for her. Hoisting his mother up and onto his back, he fashioned a strip of fabric across his forehead for his mother to hang on to. Barefoot and dangling on his back like a baby opossum, the aged mother held on for the entire 13-mile trek. All the while, her son’s machete slashed and stabbed at the dense undergrowth, carving a Little Sliver, a way forward, a path of hope in the wilderness.

Little Slivers come in many wrappings. They may be a highway for audacious Harley motorcyclists. But when laid out upon the globe, Little Slivers can reshape a map. They can also create outsized consternation and suffering—the stabbing pain of a toenail or the anguish of a broken dream.

And there are the undervalued Little Slivers, the hopes like those within an aged woman. They remain unnoticed and little regarded except by another watchful, caring person. By lifting those precious slivers onto our backs and carrying them within our hearts, we may offer a hopeful way forward. When their sacrifice truly becomes ours—a lasting burden embedded within our own hearts—we may attain a new and hopeful Little Sliver for our own future.

Squirrel Lessons

Two screens in our living room provide us delightful entertainment. The screen named Samsung lets us peek into jarring world news, a Jeopardy battle of brains and memory, and monochromatic Godzilla reruns.

The other screen, a 72-inch-long window, provides a panoramic view across the top of our cedar fence. Our neighbor’s lemon, orange and grapefruit trees provide the backdrop for the furry actors who scutter along the top rail. Squirrels are always nervous: Run. Brake. Freeze. Quick, flick tail. Think. Think. Scratch parasites. Whoops. No time. Twitch. Ah, at that last twitch, squirrel number two enters from stage right; he is recognizable by his unkempt, thinning tail hair. Viewing from our living room, we erupt into cheers as the two-squirrel drama unfolds on the Great Cedar Fence Freeway. Will they fight? Will their hearts seize from fear over the snarls of the neighbor’s frenzied Belgian Malinois? Through the window, can they watch Godzilla playing on Samsung, or do they merely perceive their own reflections? Can our furry dramatists perceive us, gaping at them through the window? And I wonder…do they like us?

Last week’s squirrel encounter was far different. By counting the imagined rings around my belly as you would count the rings of a tree trunk, you would say I should have “aged out” of the population who tows a fiberglass trailer into the semi-wilderness. But we still enjoy camping, the fresher air, the reduced population density, even our aging, flimsy mattresses. They all speak of mutinous freedom.

Halfway through our camping stay, I peered into the recess of our on-board toilet to survey the contents—a management technique of critical importance to avoid dreadful toilet overflows during the black of night. So courageously, I drained a generous serving into our portable black water tank, then hoisted it ever so gently into our 4Runner. Without incident, I emptied the tank and returned to our site. While gingerly unloading the emptied tank from the car, a young voice demanded my attention.

“Hey, mister! Did you know you got a dead squirrel hangin’ off yer front axle?” Indeed, I did not. Eleven-year-old Weston, with a gene pool shared by Huck Finn and a minor league bat boy, introduced himself. Camping with his grandfather, he had spied the furry lump of a ground squirrel’s body waving like a furry flag. I crawling under to inspect the slain vermin, its body unmoving yet curiously unbloodied. It resembled a bat, upside-down, asleep in the wrong place. Not wanting to touch the nasty, disease-ridden carcass, I searched for a stick to poke it down.

Before I could don protective gloves, suitable eye protection and unpack infection-fighting iodine, Weston’s voice proclaimed, “Got it! Here you go!” he proclaimed, crawling out from under my car. “I heard it make a loud thump when you started your car.” Weston presented me with the squirrel carcass and we examined it together. It had been healthy, heavier than I expected, bearing a lovely pelt. Weston and I performed a quick coroner’s inspection and discovered it was a recent mother, adding more pain to the tragedy.

That evening, I approached the campfire that belonged to Weston and his grandfather to thank the boy, a ten-dollar bill in my fist. Weston’s grandfather sat alone, his grey, scraggly hair escaping beneath an antique wide-brimmed hat. He had the beard of an aged Confederate soldier. “My grandpa never did nothin’ fur me,” Grandfather explained to me. With spicy words, he described how he wasn’t going to do the same to his own grandson. “I can take him camping. I can teach him all the things my grandpa never taught me.” He punctuated the sentence with an accomplished spit. “That’s really the best we can do, ain’t it?” I assured him that, yes, that’s a great thing to do.

Just then, Weston exited their camper and approached the fire, myself, and his grandfather holding an empty Budweiser can.

“You did an awesome job helping me today,” I offered Weston. “You handled that like a real man. You came and told me about the squirrel. You didn’t have to do that. And then you crawled under my car to get the squirrel so that I didn’t have to. You really didn’t have to do that either. If I were your grandfather, I’d be proud of you. Here’s a bit of an offering to thank you,” I said, presenting him the ten-spot.

Weston’s eyes showed that he had rarely held that much money at one time. We shook hands. “Your grandfather is wanting to help make a good man out of you. And you know what? I’d say you’re already well on your way. No doubt about it. Oh yeah, you’re very well on your way!”

The List Makers

General George “Old Blood and Guts” Patton, the foulmouthed, super-egotistical, hyper-combustible hero of the Battle of the Bulge, had a problem. Yes, he had created the plan that could turn the battle, and ultimately World War II around in the Allies favor. But success depended on getting his Air Force off the ground. Day after day the weather had his planes socked in. At that moment, they weren’t going anywhere. But Patton had a secret weapon, which we now know as Patton’s Prayer, his wish list to the Almighty:

“All I’m asking for is four days of ‘clear weather.’ Consent to give me as Your gift four days of blue sky, so that my airplanes can take off, hunt, bomb, find their goals and annihilate them. Give me four days so that this mud can harden; allow my trucks to roll along and supply provisions and ammunition for my infantry which needs it urgently.”

As we now know, Patton’s wish list was fulfilled. The Battle of the Bulge was an Allied turning point in winning the war.

We are all list makers, though perhaps of a more modest nature than Patton’s ambitious, win-the-war prayer list. Who has not scribbled homework assignments or hastily jotted phone numbers on the back side of hands or along forearms, only to have that all-important number, the path to a possible love connection, dissolve beneath sweat and grime?

My seventh grade biology teacher began each class session slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately. His Louisiana drawl was so thick he chewed his words on their way out. He squeezed his words like the last thick goo from a rolled up toothpaste tube. “Oh, baah thu waay, did y’all remember to brang yur notebooooks?” Of course we all “brang” our notebooks. Since our teacher declined issuing textbooks for the entire year of biology class, we were obliged to take notes from his daily verbal recitations. Gradually, we filled our notebooks, our de facto textbooks, with these lessons. They contained the entire year’s syllabus, the interminable listing of phylum and sub-phylum, genus and species. Headings begat subheadings and sub-subheadings, tabulated lists and sublists of my seventh grade biology.

That was when I recognized that I suffered from LMD, “List Maker Disorder,” acquired while surviving my seventh grade biology class.

My friend has a severe case of LMD. He has a Rolodex, that ancient rotating index card holder that contains the names of people we should not forget. Unusually, my friend’s Rolodex is is not made of card stock. Instead, it is deep inside his head, tucked away in his brain’s memory. My friend performs hourlong daily prayer walks, during which he draws out from his Rolodex memory the list of those he intends to pray for. I’ve accompanied him on those walks; he never runs out of names.

Quite by accident, I recently tumbled across another kindred LMD spirit. A neighbor’s father had stopped by our house for a quick visit. Upon exiting, he spun around, and, quick as a wasp sting, he pulled a folded, creased paper from the satchel slung over his shoulder and presented it to me as a “thank you” gesture. Across the top, he had hand-scrawled “Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007)”. Below, numbered and annotated, he had listed dozens of the titles of opera singer Pavarotti’s recordings, jamming the paper’s full width. When I spied “Nessus Dorma,” it triggered my mouth to snap open, a mouse trap triggered in reverse. With our next full breath, my visiting neighbor and I struck out boldly in unison, bellowing our own unrehearsed tenor-voiced version of the song. When we ran out of words, we continued, ad libbing our “la-la-la” arrangement. What had just happened? Two list-makers had discovered one another’s orbits.

Some lists reflect the view at 30,000 feet, ordering the world in widescreen gorgeous IMAX clarity. The valued lives of people, the things and activities of life claim their places within this world view, the kind of list with impressive perspective and purpose. Other lists are born in the sediment, the grime of the mundane, each element consisting of equal, uninspiring weight. They offer neither clarity, inspiration nor purpose. They are the most forgettable sorts of lists.

The lists we make reflect the values of those who create the list. Whether Patton’s request for battle victory, obligatory notes ordering facts and knowledge, prayer lists for beloved family and friends, or the splurge of capturing beauty for pure joy, we are all list makers. If well compiled, they can help to keep our heads on straight, our hearts aligned, and our walk upright.

Wandering

With the determination of a Muscle Beach body builder, the pale green lizard performed pushups on tiny arms, intending to draw admiration from an adoring female. Instead, with no comely female Reptilia in sight, it drew only my attention, as it pushed hard up and down against a warmed rock. The superheated West Texas summer attracted few visitors. As we hiked along a nearly indecipherable rocky path, the sun baked both the lizard and ourselves. Still, we bet against the midday scorch. The vast desert would provide the wandering adventure we sought.

Beginning our trek at midday just as the thermometer eclipsed one hundred degrees, we realized we were out of our element. Carrying no water with us, we firmly cemented our novice status. Never mind, it would be a quick hike. Upon returning to our car at its completion, freezing air conditioning would await us. So we tripped onward, energized that we were the lone brave souls wandering through this hostile world. Occasionally, a surprised rattlesnake hastily retreated across our trail. Jackrabbit scat baked along the stones marking the trail’s edge, though we noticed the trail markers growing increasingly rare and random. Once reassuring, the pathway eventually disappeared altogether. We searched for clues. Was this a stone arrangement pointing forward, or the burial marker of previous hikers, wanderings that would prove to be their final wilderness hike? Five miles into our hike, we were lost, so what to do next? Should we soldier onward hoping to discover the markers again, or would we attempt an uncertain recovery and retrace our steps? With no water, no trail, and 105 degrees of scorching heat, we were like wandering Jews—minus the water from the rock, the manna, and Moses or Joshua.

By definition, wanderings stretch boundaries and challenge limits. Good wanderings hold adventures and untold stories, yet they can be scary and hold danger. Songs are written in their honor:

“My father was a wanderer,

And it’s also in my blood,

So I happily wander as long as I can

And I wave with my hat

Valeri, valera,

Valeri, valera ha ha ha ha ha,

Valeri, valera,

And I wave with my hat.”

Frankly, it sings much better in the original German lyrics. Nonetheless, the song accurately describes my own father. When he passed away last year, aged 106, my Artist-Father proved to be a wanderer to the end. Left-brain required tasks were not his thing. Without the aid of a check-writing coach, he would stare uncomprehendingly at his checkbook. But even though aged, by changing his mental channel to his impassioned world of art, he would defy gravity, rise and hover over his wheelchair, balance against the walker that held his paint palette, and stab at his wall-hung oil paintings. Brush in hand, he would improve them yet again! Precarious, yes. Inhibited, no. Dad never learned to stay on the beaten track or, for that matter, off his little apartment’s walls.

Can we recall the last time we wandered off the beaten track? Perhaps to our loss, many of us learned early on to stay ruthlessly on track and to avoid coloring, painting, or wandering outside the lines.

I recently installed a 100-watt solar panel on the roof of our 17-foot camping trailer that inhabits the driveway. Thus equipped, she can charge her battery unaided. It was a sort of “put a ring on it” moment, lending our relationship full empowerment. Now she can hum and buzz with glorious self-generating power, our energized equal as we wander roads, whether paved or dirt. I felt I had breathed new wandering life into our little Pinocchio.

Of course, our tiny trailer offers no equivalency to the wanderings of bold explorers. Instead, she provides us with our-scale wanderings, helping us to dial in randomized mixes of people, places and events. Sometimes, we are led on a leisurely stroll through the woods beneath ancient oaks with deeply scarred bark, moss-covered stones cradling a brook’s clear and crisp waters. At other times, our trailer delivers us into a different kind of wandering—an unpredictable Vitamix concoction of unexplored places and previously unknown faces. They are random wanderings, though afterwards we wonder if they were indeed very random. Long after these events occur, the retelling begins with, “Do you remember when…” and the warm joy of familiarity tickles our brains once again. We embrace these wanderings as being somehow sacred, each retelling resurrecting a precious, sweet nectar.

Our hiking path having disappeared in the vast West Texas desert, we rambled blindly on, sunbaked and lost, our wandering adventure grown not so sweet! By now, with sun blazing and deep concern setting in (yes, we might call it “panic”), I happened to recall one steady feature during our hours-long wandering mishap: for miles behind us, a lone utility line had bisected the cloudless sky. I now recalled observing it even from the now-distant plot where we had parked our car. I surmised that we could now follow that power line, straight as a prickly pear thorn, leading us back to our trail’s beginning and the safety of our car. And so it did. Found again! Joy and relief at being alive!

There is a counterpart to wandering: restoration. Restoration, that essential element that salves and strengthens us upon a return from wandering, can be easily underestimated. Yet restoration is the most critical component for wanderers. Returning from wandering in a desert, whether actual, relational or emotional, demands commemoration. Restoration after wandering through an illness, from captivity, and return from grieving, all deserve uncommon celebration, the sort held for soldiers returning from war.

And for those friends who have helped us both to wander and to return from wandering, we also owe uncommon celebration.

Like the utility line, they help to guide us onward toward wandering, and afterward, homeward, toward restoration.

Investment Accounting

Youth imagines time to run on forever. Typical of our young station in life, there is neither enough time nor money to supply our interests. Investable resources are drawn down to support the thing at hand, with less thought of those many decades ahead.

Perhaps, for awhile, that is as it should be. Youth feeds upon the hope of opportunities at hand to grow the vision and passion of our yet-to-be discovered futures. How many times, as young people, have we re-imagined what our lives would become? Somehow, ageless bodies, good fortune and our emerging skillset would provide whatever that future held.

During my early twenties, it first occurred to me that I was falling behind. The automated success ladder I had envisioned for my life became less automatic, and I slowly veered off course, a small degree at first, which widened with my advancing age. How had I been relegated, at my first job, to cleaning toilets in a restaurant? How did I find myself, shirtless, hot, and profusely sweaty, baling hay in Mississippi? And, ignorant of the profoundly itchy characteristics of okra upon the skin, how was I now ignorantly harvesting it bare-handed and bare-chested?

I continued onward with vague goals, and without the means to achieve them. Little did I recognize that I tottered already on the precipice of an ungoverned financial future.

The earnings of $1.25 per hour at my first job were put toward my first car ownership, a 1962 MGA Mark II Roadster with rusted door panels, which I purchased for $300 when I was 17. I considered this purchase a mighty good investment both toward transportation and developing social opportunities with the fairer sex.

I failed to realize that the $300 required for the purchase of the MGA, along with all my other earnings, did not belong to me. Rather, it was all on loan to me, as were all the other accounts of my life, monetary or otherwise. Success in every enterprise, reputation, health, relationships with family and friends were all ceded to me from God. They were on loan to me. My interest should be to prosper them and generate what good I could of them, before the eventual completion of the terms of the loan.

My thinking started to change. I began asking myself — when time itself is folded up and retired, what value of our lives is there remaining?

The Gospel of Luke, chapter 19, reminds us of the investments loaned by a nobleman to three servants. Upon his return, the nobleman would ask for an accounting of the three loans. One servant took wise risks, investing his loan aggressively, which paid off. Over time, his financial investment soared, as did, we might assume, the other similarly managed affairs of his life. Due to his devotion to excellence, his professional advancements arrived with remarkable speed. Before long, he himself purchased the very company that had initially hired him. He may have become a man of great influence, whether obvious or subtle in nature. He stirred vision and passion in others by his virtuous behavior. Once, upon taking a corner too fast, an old Volkswagen overturned; he ran over to help, rolled the car over with the driver still strapped in the seat, then pulled out the crumpled fenders with his bare hands. He was a gregarious sort. When his neighbors complained about the ruckus from the parties he would throw for his friends, he remedied the issue by inviting them to his parties as well. Upon his ultimate return, the master was pleased with him, very well pleased, and the servant was appropriately rewarded.

The second servant was equally virtuous, a prudent lifelong conservative investor. His were ever an equal mix of stock and bond ETF financial investment products. They were safe, and he needn’t fret over economic downturns. His finances were established to weather adversity, as were his other affairs. A man of lesser passion than the first servant, he carefully governed his relationships. His friendships with others, cookie-cutter versions of himself, were reliable and pleasantly in tune with his own persuasions. He was a faithful and good worker, advancing up the predictable ranks to the admiring “Atta boy!”accolades of his coworkers. Upon passing by a person in need, he might consider how he might meet the need, pause for the briefest moment, then press on. “Ah! A little too late, already passed by—never mind.” To prove his compassion, he would be the first to phone in a 911 emergency—from a safe distance across the street. He noted his tarnished world and its misdirected values, and he exerted his passionless, middling efforts, budging toward doing good when convenient, and performing righteous acts without staining his trousers.

A lone koi fish circled the grimy pond within the courtyard of the third servant. Deflated by life, he awaited funds for its restoration. A browbeaten and fearful man, he expected the worst and accomplished little. He supposed his boss to be an abrupt and unpredictable taskmaster, who himself would take credit for the servant’s work. A boss, he mistakenly perceived, with unreal expectations and no room for lax performance. Office parties were a thing of horror for the servant, who with feigned devotion would heap self-ingratiating praise upon his supervisor. He danced, like a marionette, to earn his boss’s approval. In the end, the character flaws within the third servant produced no growth whatsoever, no improvement of character, performance, relationships, grace, or virtue. The servant succumbed to such self-manufactured fear that he squandered the generous nobleman’s loan, securing it safely within his mattress, its real value slowly but surely depreciating over time; he ended with less than what he had been entrusted with.

At the appointed time, the nobleman, now crowned king, would return and require an accounting of his investments long in the making. But before then, we may make two observations. The first is that a reward clearly awaited those who had invested wisely. And perhaps even more prescient—while the nobleman was yet away, there was still time enough for the servants to mend their ways.

Emerging Stones

Once a rock, now a stone — Transformation by Wes Dahlberg
— © 2024 Craig Dahlberg

Well past his 80th year, my father hopped along the rocks on the beach just out of reach of sloshing waves, searching for the next face peering from along the shore. Each rock he selected became his canvas. But his art would not hold the mundane image of a stylized tree or a vivid green frog painted to adorn a doorstop. Instead, he peered deeply into the contours and subtle colorations to unlock what, or who, was already there, waiting to be discovered.

“There! Can you see him? And look, over his shoulder, there’s his daughter embracing her puppy,” he would describe. And of course, we all said we did, even if we had no clue what image and story the blank rock actually contained.

To the last day I pushed my father’s wheelchair through the parking lot, he required me to stop to review the subtleties of granite stones in the outside walls of his assisted living residence to identify imaginary faces and scenes locked within the patterns of the stones, staring back at us. What were they saying to us? Can you hear them? Can you see them? Then, “Forward!” my father would have declared, his eye ever searching onward, outward, and inward to set free the next stone captive.

Just when does a rock become a stone? A rock lies unused in a quarry or unnoticed beside a road or pathway; a rock serves no particular intention or use. However, a rock becomes a stone when it is put to a purpose. The rock gives birth to a stone. We christen a stone when we ennoble it to possess a specific use. A rock, for example, converts into a stone when it becomes part of a stone wall to keep out intruders, or when a rock is re-purposed as cobblestone, transformed into a pathway for our use.

By the time of his passing at 106 years old on November 1 of 2023, my father had transformed hundreds of rocks into stones, releasing the faces of the captives held within them. The subtle detail that he added with his horsehair paintbrush—no cutting instruments allowed—defined and refined them, drawing the images out and giving them their first breath.

When he finally departed, Dad’s death removed my last bit of scaffolding to the former generation. He was the last survivor of my parents’ generation. Gone were his wife, her parents, his parents, his brother, his nephew, his in-law parents and brothers and sisters. All that was left is the next generation: my brother and myself. Like Dad’s stones, we now stood on the top shelf, placeholders for now, for our generation and the ones to come. That top tier is a windier place, unprotected now that Dad is gone. We feel less protected from the forces of nature that now seem colder and damper, with our face against the wind. It is for us, now, to repeat “Forward!”

*****************

On a boring, routine night of tedious sheep-tending chores, a young shepherd played hacky sack with his sheep’s droppings. He checked for consistency and coloration as he bounced the dung off one foot to the other and back again. Discoloration or soft poop would indicate problems. Achingly monotonous, tending sheep provided plenty of opportunity to amuse himself and to contemplate his place in the world. His notions drifted in the air, along with the musty, fetid odors of his sheep. As the youngest and therefore the least in the family, he did not have the first pick of the chores. Hence, sheepherding was his lot. Could he, alone on this forlorn hilltop, be mindful? Would he tend this moment with no urgency, no purpose, or with both urgency and purpose? Where was his own “Forward” call within his menial service?

Caring for the sheep consumed his life. He considered his only significant moments were in transporting food supplies to the nearby battle lines. In stealth, he would deliver hardy supplies—grain, bread and cheese—to the unit on the front lines, then again return to the menial tasks, herding his bleating, smelly beasts. Today, at dawn’s break, he again loaded up the supplies, arriving to the sound of the clamor of battle. As usual, a vulgar dispute broke out among the front line ranks over today’s strategy. How to defend against the renewed threats of the enemy?

With opportunity arise both fear and courage. Fear announces an impending disastrous consequence—a wrong choice or a step too far. Courage responds—how? With the possible regret of having not tried, grappled, and succeeded.

“Forward!” came the sudden, unexpected voice of courage in the shepherd’s brain. It traveled to his hands, into his fingers, and toward his feet. Its sudden sound drove him to his knees, into the waters of a stream, where he quickly groped for the heavy, smoothed objects at the water’s edge. In a moment, he gathered the prizes from the bank and dropped them into his travel pouch. And in the same moment he lifted the pieces of granite from the stream, his brain fog cleared to reveal the purpose of the morning and of his life.

When does a rock become a stone?

A rock becomes a stone when that rock is put to a purpose. It becomes a stone the moment a young shepherd inserts the rock into his sling and lets it soar, fast and sure, splitting both the morning sky and, meeting its intended mark, a skull opened and split wide.

One Before Me, One Behind Me

“Ahead and behind wound the line of the hungry…”
—Morro Bay, California © 2023 Craig Dahlberg

My exterminator paraded the last fallen warrior of The Rat Wars through our bedroom, its limp body dangling from its long naked tail, head thoroughly flattened by the steel spring of the rat trap—a real ratastrophy. The pelt was surprisingly clean, a brown body with a white fur mask across the face. I wondered how large a garment a skilled taxidermist might have fashioned from all the deceased rats retrieved from my attic. Rat hides collected, preserved with salt and expertly sewn together—why not rat fur gloves or a rat fur scarf? A handsome pair of rat fur socks, perhaps?

When cornered or trapped, neither humans nor rats do very well. We all look for a way out. Like my unsuspecting rats, I had gradually backed into a trap of my own making. Reared in a conservative, rule-following family, I had learned well how to color between the lines. Armed with correct manners and a conformed instinct to please, by high school I was reliably prepared to enter a boys’ boarding school, far from home. Along with my eleven other classmates, we learned the standard high school subjects, but at an accelerated rate. During winter, we had but to step out of our dormitory and ski down the mountain, then take the funicular back up the mountain. We were boys then, turning into men, far away from the girls who were turning into women.

Returning stateside after attending the boarding school abroad, I enrolled in an affluent high school with a challenging and emotionally disruptive social scene. The ratio of automobile-owning teenagers to the high school teen population was nearly one-to-one. Girls draped themselves into the cockpits of Corvette convertibles piloted by their pimply-faced, steady boyfriends. Heavily modified Ford Mustangs snarled out of the student parking lot. I was an outsider. I crawled into the nearly-empty yellow school bus, staring out the window in consternation, ready to be transported to my silent home, punctuated perhaps by a family-centric TV show—Mitch Miller and his band, or Lawrence Welk’s drone to his orchestra, “And a one, and a two!” How conservative. How comfortable. How stifling.

It was a confusing, baffling time, made more so after plotting for six months to ask a girl out on my very first date. I was shot down with the most pedestrian of explanations: “I’m busy that night.” I backed so far into my rat hole that a Rat Hole Safety Inspector would have required the installation of a breathing ventilation tube.

And then—Lord have mercy—came college. With it would come the specter of more teenage wraiths mutating into young adults, with me looking on, locked away by fear, silence and envy.

Three times each day, at precise intervals, the college dormitories belched out their inhabitants, who joined the winding, rapidly-lengthening cafeteria line. I would wriggle myself uncomfortably into the line, managing my discomfort by staring at the blank tile-covered, creme-colored wall, silently calculating the total quantity of shiny ceramic tiles, as if on a divine mission.

Ahead and behind wound the line of hungry students, a serpentine row along the stairway running through me, then past me, up toward the top of the stairway. Young women with side-swept hair bobs wore pink, orange and citrus green mini-skirts. For the college-age men, it was mop-top hair, extended sideburns and wispy mustaches, paisley shirts and bell-bottom trousers. Teetering on the steps, I hugged the hand rail. Gradually, we came within sniffing range of the standard-fare shepherd’s pie as we rounded the corner to the cafeteria.

I was acrophobic, balancing on one step, fearful to look at the next person in line behind me. Nonetheless, I shot a glance toward her downward-facing head. Unexpectedly, she glanced up at me. I was galled. Good grief. What to do? It was too late to look away. “Hi,” I muttered, confounded that was all I could come up with. What was wrong with me?

That night, my churning stomach made little progress against the shepherd’s pie. I desperately needed a way out of my painful introversion and self-imposed social exile.

I concocted a Grand Scheme.

What do you do when folks within the smell of your breath smile at you, ask your name, and express genuine interest in your story? The answer is simple—probably you smile back at them, ask their name, and ask about their own story. In so doing, I would weaponize my Grand Scheme.

The next day, I again stood in the cafeteria line, one person before me, one person behind me. The same conflict burned—what to say? What to do? But this day, I had promised myself, things would be different. I again half-turned my head to the one student before me and the one student behind me. And this time, I heard myself exchanging names, and listening to their stories as we wound up the dining hall stairway.

And so the Grand Scheme began. I learned the names and stories of two students in each meal line, the one ahead and the one behind me in line, three meals each day. Like a fledgling the first time out of its nest, I discovered a bigger world, and my life gradually transformed from inward isolation to outward-focused engagement.

As with all great discoveries, I was ruined for the past; I could not go back. To this day, the Grand Scheme lives on. These many decades later, I still happily enjoy the effects of this single decision—to attend to the One Before Me, and to attend to the One Behind Me.

Snailville

Smallville is the fictional earthly home of Krypton-born Superman. Snailville, however, has nothing to do with the superhero. Instead, it is the earthly home of racing snails, the shelled gastropods that we children set about to compete against one another. Trembling from nerves, we lined up our racing snails at the starting gate like microcars spoiling for a fight.

A snail racetrack should be sloped at a steep angle to encourage the participants to travel roughly in a similar direction. On a good day, given no head wind, a minimum delay for retracting eyeball stalks, and the absence of menacing predators, a snail’s pace reaches three feet per hour. So the finish line should be chalked at a reasonable distance, that is to say, fewer than 12 inches from the starting gate.

To improve our racing odds, each of us kids owned several sizable snails, the sort that is large enough, if given unfortunate circumstances, to produce a loud crunch beneath a careless footstep in a garden, the resulting squishified mess to be laboriously peeled away and cleaned up with stick and leaves.

Ours were handsome snails. Scrubbed of habitat soil, their shells gleamed a lustrous brown and tan. Admittedly, there is little to differentiate one attractive snail from another. Lacking distinguishing elements such as eyebrows, body hair, facial expression, nose, or body tattoos, it can be difficult for an untrained eye to tell them apart. The dexterity of the single foot or the patterns on the shell may be the few indicators of snail identity. Though snails doubtless can tell one another apart, for our purposes it was useful to easily recognize and identify them.

Some might have casually nicknamed them “Goblin Beak,” or “Google Eyes.” We, however, never considered disrespecting them. Instead, because of our devotion for them and the limited space on each shell, we distinguished each racing snail shell with painstakingly painted numbers. Incidentally, a 2018 issue of the Journal of Molluscan Studies declared the metallic silver and gold ink of Pilot brand pens to be the preferred shell-marking identifier. This discovery arrived far too late for our 1958 snail competitions, so I simply painted number “6” upon my favorite snail in acrylic.

When we lined them up atop the bomb shelter, their shells seemed to serve as protective helmets as they spoiled for the start of the 10-inch long snail-paced sprint.

Did I say, “bomb shelter”? Merely 13 years after the end of World War II, a bomb shelter in Cologne, Germany, where we lived, provided the perfect hardened concrete snail race track. The cement slope with padlocked rusted steel door at one end was the entrance to the sepulcher-like shelter, which was buried deep underground. I speculated what bizarre secrets the long-shackled bomb shelter might hold. Might there be decaying wooden tables and chairs and mildewed bedding awaiting those fleeing a feared Allied bombing run? Perhaps there were stashes of hastily discarded Nazi paraphernalia or mold-growing furry children’s toys or faded, unposted love letters. Worse, could it be a ghastly tomb containing skeletal remains, victims of the tyrannical German Reich?

Our snails were mere blisters atop the concrete racetrack, the entrance to the bomb shelter. I would coax, “Go, Number 6!” but my exhortations did little to hasten the slow unraveling of foot from shell and erection of eyes perched like celery seeds atop miniature bendable celery stalks. I had long learned that eye-poking, entertaining as it was, only slowed a snail’s glacial forward pace.

We protected and secreted our prized snails in glass jars, thoughtfully converted into homey snail residences with random leaves, twigs, and shallow water to provide both nourishment and enough humidity to promote healthy gastropod hygiene. Still, we were not perfect snail handlers. We discovered that warm sunny days could prove lethal for snails in glass jars. The magnified sun rays could reduce our racing snail population to empty shells at the bottom of the jar, floating atop brownish tan ooze, liquified snail bodies reduced to soup.

There was always the danger of intruders. More than once, we discovered our best shell-numbered racing snails murdered, their glass jar residences smashed, along with their shells, amid tiny puddles of snail entrails. We would quickly discover that the neighborhood raider kids had struck.

The starting flag dropped, and the shell-helmeted racers commenced their competition atop the bomb shelter racetrack. I coaxed Number 6 onward, yelling into his earless head, hoping for a stiff forward-propelling thump upon his shell from a falling acorn. He tried hard not to disappoint, slime faithfully administered beneath his foot, which was aimed down the steeply sloped cement raceway. It took forbearance and an adherence to the rules to resist dragging a distracted and wandering snail racer half an inch forward; perched upon this bomb shelter, we learned patience—boatloads of patience.

Had Jesus had been born in Germany, and had this concrete bomb shelter been His temporary tomb before His escape from death on that history-bending day, I suspect He would have paused on his way past the rusted, padlocked door. Snailville would have caught his gaze on His way up and out of that black sepulcher—the racetrack, snail Number 6, and us, patiently waiting—and He, just the sort of guest we could only have hoped for.

Toilet Training

The 17-foot long camping trailer we tow behind us should hardly be called a “mobile home.” It’s more of a miniature “mobile room,” with part of it sectioned off, creating the world’s smallest bathroom on wheels. Ironically, there is no “bath” in the bathroom. There is a shower, a hand-held portable wand connected to a length of plastic hose. This miniature room is a toilet hovel, a place to do your business, then pray you can quickly unlock the door to escape.

Heaven help the unsuspecting first-time shower victim, unfamiliar with the concept of sitting, backside exposed of course, atop a toilet seat that is still in the down position, reminding you that you’re there to shower—and nothing else at the moment. First, without a modicum of propriety, you remove every stitch of clothing because, well, you’re going to shower, of course. Now, where do you put the dirty clothing, and where do you put the newly unpacked and clean clothing? One choice is to strip naked just outside the teeny bathroom, a good choice for maneuverability, but not so great if curious visitors drop by, peeking inside just after you drop your skivvies. (“Oh, I just love how cute this little trailer is!” they will coo.) Another option is to cram yourself into the microscopic toilet/shower with your contortionist handbook outlining the moves required to disrobe, toss your clothes out the door, and then pretzel yourself into painful showering positions. Reverse this time-consuming and torturous process to dress in your clean, humidity-soaked clothes. Oh, wait! Just where are my clean clothes!?

Our trailer is so small that it disappears behind any motor home parked near it. “Weren’t we on this row?” I’ll ask my wife after our evening walk. “Was it Honeydew Lane, or was it Gumball Alley?” We always eventually find our fiberglass aquarium-sized rolling cabin. “Oh, that’s right! We must be next to that bus christened Goliath.” It drips gaudy Christmas lights, declaring, “We’re roughing it cooler than you are!” And there is the dog, displayed like window dressing—those omnipresent chihuahua mixes eternally guarding the dashboard of a Class A motor home, a rabid omnivore ready to tear the arm off any unsuspecting camper wandering inadvisedly across the white chalk line demarkation between hallowed camping turf, those microscopic chihuahua teeth engineered to bisect a slice of limp salami.

Our previous tiny 16-foot camper had two dining tables, one at each end. They could each be converted into beds. One side was a slightly tight fit for two, but sleeping head to toe in sleeping bags was a doable adaptation. With these arrangements, we could take another couple camping with us. Another couple, that is, whom we might know quite well and was not shy about propriety. The true test of friendship was a fold-up porta-potty, shared among the four. At night, especially considering an extended nighttime jaunt to the camp bathroom, and given sufficient space between campsites, I would place the porta-potty just outside the camper door, semi-concealed.

One night, nature called. I crawled silently out of my sleeping bag, a ghost fashionably attired in plaid sleeping pants. I carefully pulled the camper door shut behind me, gently turning the handle to prevent it from clicking like a midnight gunshot. I tiptoed to the porta-pottie, lifted the lid and paused. What next? Delivering while standing would amplify the ensuing splash of a mountain waterfall, loud enough to wake my companions. Instead, I knelt down before the toilet as if doing homage from a church pew. Halfway through, I froze. Behind me, the unexpected popping of twigs and of swishing leaves announced a visitor. Were it a deer or even a coyote, I could have struck out with my free fist. It was something far worse. Unknown to me, our female camping companion had preceeded me out of the camper and was returning from the campground restroom. Now we both encountered one another, each earnestly attending to our own mission, one of us having graciously completed her bathroom duties while the other, ill-timed, still knelt, mid-stream.

It took her a moment to figure out what was going on, seeing me kneeling before a toilet with the lid up, plaid sleeping pants reflecting the moonlight. She gave out a sudden weird sound, a strange horrified half-giggle, half-choke, the kind of sound Minnie Mouse might make, trying to cough up throat phlegm. My back was to her, so over my shoulder, I cheerfully blurted, “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” I looked like a giant, half-full teapot emptying its contents, my free hand fashionably placed upon my hip, elbow splayed outward, my arm forming a large teapot handle.

We both froze. The only sound was a stream, then a rivulet, then a slow trickle from within the plastic porta-pottie. Panicked, I dissected the entire Websters Dictionary in my head, searching for the right words to say, but came up empty.

Have you ever, at the end of the day, discovered your zipper down? And then you realize it has been that way since before lunchtime, the last time you used the bathroom? How many hours, and people, have passed by since then? And then you re-create various sitting postures and walking positions you’ve performed throughout the day to see just how awful it might have been? It was worse than that.

I crawled into bed, burying my head into my sleeping bag. The next morning, at breakfast, my wife inquired, “How did you sleep last night?” She and the female traveling companion who stumbled across me during the night were already suffering sore ribs inflicted by mirth and hilarity. After they recovered, my wife disclosed, “I was awake, and I knew that both of you were out of the camper at the same time for the same purpose. I could hear you using the porta-potty, so I was just waiting for the meetup!”

Getting Rid of Pets

I have always loved my pets, whether dogs, guinea pigs, my boa constrictor named Boaz, two lizards named Liz and Ard, or the zebra finches who suffered their simultaneous dramatic demise, feet pointing skyward in the bottom of their cage after choking on sunflower seeds. Yes, though cleaning cages can grow wearisome, I never thought of “doing in my pets” because of it. No way.

That is, until today—because today I received this notice from my extermination contractor: “Getting rid of pets just got easier.”

Imagine that! My exterminator, who rids our premises of cockroaches, rats, ants, and gophers, now has a side hustle: eliminating unwanted pets! No doubt he’s using the agony-inflicting chemicals already pre-loaded onto his truck! I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the notice. What a brilliant, demented scheme! A one-stop shop to eliminate all annoying vermin and all pets!

I was infuriated and determined to whistleblow these clowns. I hastily typed in a Google search for the phone numbers of ASPCA, PETA and Petco. I was seething with a holy, self-righteous sort of seething.

As my computer hunted for the numbers, I fumed (not, “fumigated”) as I read the exterminator company’s promotional blurb one more time: “Getting red of pests just got easier.”

Oh—PESTS, not PETS! Whoop-sie. My mis-read. My bad.

As my blood pressure gradually receded, it gave me time to think. I was relieved. Good! I still get to annihilate cockroaches, yet keep my precious pets!

And I wondered about my pets.

As it turns out, I have a lot of “pets” beyond the furry and scaly variety. In fact, I possess a virtual menagerie in my garage. There are the soft-back and hardback books undisturbed for decades, their yellow rat-pee stained pages buried beneath compound layers of gathered dust. Beside them lie the carcasses of ancient iPhones, rest in peace. Lurking in the shadows, buried in random plastic containers, lie thousands of orphaned screws, bolts, nails, and washers. All my pets.

This Pet Became a Pest. A Scary One.

I had other pets that did not inhabit my garage. It started out as a pet, small and cute and respectable, but it eventually outgrew its own sort of cage, which was a record player case. In 1936, Sergei Prokofiev composed “Peter and the Wolf” for kids just like me. When I was in first grade, I had access to my parents’ record player and that record. I loved that record and that player. At first.

When I placed the armature of that record player onto the black spinning plastic, magic happened. Out jumped every character in the story, each portrayed by a different instrument—a bassoon for the grandfather, kettle drums for the hunters, nasty french horns for the nasty wolf, a flute for the freaked-out-frightened bird, and an oboe for the duck who was eaten alive by the wolf. Alas, heroic Peter, represented by a calming stringed section, arrived on the scene too late to allay my panic-mottled pink cheeks.

When the climactic, freak-me-out scary music let forth, I knew that the characters were alive beneath my dark and dusty bed. The wolf! The hunter! The mangled duck! The frightened bird! Mercy! Quick—I must get on top of the bed until the massacre was over!

My pets—the record and record player—obviously went very wrong. The story had grown too real, and the record player became a huge pest of frightening proportion. Eventually, I didn’t even want to play the thing. A pest, perhaps, and even more than that. My pet became a pest and a terror.

This Pest Became a Pet. A Lovely One.

Two of my grandchildren own a Rattus, the fancy genus name for a rat. I have unwittingly owned several of these creatures myself. They lived in our attic. After several seasons enduring scratching and gnawing sounds above my bed, and two episodes of profound stench from decaying corpses of deceased rodents, I brought in the professional with the big guns—er, rat traps.

“No need for cheese,” explained the exterminator. “These curious critters explore anything new, including a rat trap, and then, smack! The bar from the trap snaps shut and crushes any body part in its way.” He was right. In short order, I could have displayed a respectable Rattus pelt exhibit.

My granddaughter, June, owned a pet rat, Reepicheep, who was different. Reepicheep had crossed beyond the boundary of “pest-hood,” elevated to the honor of “pet-hood.” June knew just the right places to scratch him. He rested trustingly around her neck, a reciprocal bond of true friendship whenever June liberated him from his cage.

Pets Become Pets; Pests Become Pets

Perhaps I have this “pet” label and “pest” label hopelessly backward. Maybe I’ve been calling my “pets” my “pests.” And maybe I’ve been calling my “pests” my “pets.”

My pests are like this: For a long time, I’ve called life’s troubles, my “pests.” But later, looking back, I think, “I grew a lot. I learned a lot. I changed a lot. Huh!” Sort of like a friend helps you grow, in weird ways. The dictionary definition of “Trouble” is: “Trouble,” which is something that is just no good, and it hurts. But sometimes, in a weird way, trouble is good for me. And therefore my pests, my former troubles, have become my pets, the things I have come to value.

And my pets are like this: For a long time, I’ve called the warm and fuzzy and cuddly things in life, my “pets.” You know, the sorts of things that make me feel comfortable. And time-wasting. And draining. And shallow. And aimless.

You know, those kinds of pets.

You know, those kinds of pests.