Pig Paths

My wife MaryElizabeth says the shortest distance between two points is the one that keeps you moving. Whatever Einstein meant by space-time, my wife has a definition all her own.

She says it’s all laid out in pig paths, alternative routes to the most commonly used (and most congested) ways of getting around town.

The way MaryElizabeth sees it, space and time are not separate entities; the point of the game is not to eat up a given amount of space in a set amount of time. Rather, space and time are all one hunk which shrinks as time stranded in traffic diminishes, and expands with every second that ticks away as you sit idle, anywhere along your route. The winners in life are the ones who hold it all to a minimum.

What this has to do with pigs is for MaryElizabeth to know and the rest of us to meditate on, as she steers her way down side streets, across church parking lots, down one-way alleys the wrong way, hopping onto the freeway at one exit and back off at the next, then doubling back a block to her destination.

As most of us measure time, this trip might take more minutes and seconds than just driving down the straightest route and stopping dutifully at the stoplights.

For MaryElizabeth, though, the pig path holds resting in place to a minimum, and in doing so redeems any extra time or effort involved. Getting there isn’t half, or three-quarters, of the fun. What matters is getting there without having to hit your brakes.

I ride shotgun on the pig paths, which is fine with me. If I were driving I’d waste space-time right and left, and ME would be driven nuts. Plus, as the bemused observer, I get to watch her scurry down the paths babbling to herself and emitting little pig grunts. On the road, I feel like Hopalong Cassidy playing sidekick to Gabby Hayes.

Can you imagine what a joy it is to sit back, drop the leading man poses, stalwart demeanor, and straight-arrow lines, and just careen down the road with a wacko who knows what she’s doing? What a delight it is to be George Fenneman to a Groucho Marx?

This is my kind of traveling. For me, on the pig paths, getting there is all the fun.

The Trees Know Where Your Children Sleep

The old woman was paranoid. When they would pass a flatbed truck carrying goods protected by a tarp, she'd tell her daughter, "There's poison under there. Radioactive poison. They don't want you to know what it is."

Taxes were part of the conspiracy. "Why do they make us pay these taxes? It's not their money, it's our money. Who do they think we are their personal bankers skablanker money not theirs gabearus not fair to us badonkus worked for it and we should get to keepitkabeepit. I don't want to pay for all this stuff and it makes me mad doesn't it make you mad?"

"No, I'm not mad, because my money is going to pay for the national parks and I like the national parks."

"What?!"

"My money is all going to the national parks and that's where I want it to go."

"It doesn't work that way! They take your money and they use it the way they want to."

"Not mine they don't. Mine all goes to the national parks."

"You can't say where it goes. They take the money and do what they want with it."

"Not mine. I say mine goes where I want it to go."

"But you can't do that!"

"Yes, I can, and I'm happy doing it. You're the one who's sitting there having the heart attack, not me."

Was your dad as paranoid as your mother?

"Daddy worried all the time. He worried about us when we rode our bikes in the street. He worried when we climbed trees that we would fall out. He worried about things that logically might happen. But he didn't think the tree was going to suck us into its innards."

It's all part of their plan. The trees inhale the children, and then they fall on the house.

"That's how mother would have seen it--'That damned tree didn't fall on the house, it snuck over and jumped on it.'"

Downsizing Lucky

We've got our two dogs and five cats moved into the cottage. They all fit in 800 square feet, but moving from one room to another is complicated, particularly for the kittens.

These two are maturing, but have not outgrown chasing each other pell mell across the floor plan, which in the big house posed no problem, but in the cottage requires planning beyond these guys' capabilities.

Lucky is the big furry oversensitive fly in their ointment. Like most of our animals, this dog is a rescue from the pound, picked off death row by my wife with no regard for his past history. We know Lucky is scared of thunderstorms and that he, for whatever reasons, can't abide large black dogs.

We believe that somewhere in his private past he was captured, taken to an undisclosed location by terrorist cats, and tortured within an inch of his young life. He has been marked forever by some such horrible experience, because any time one of the cats gets within 20 feet of him he curls his lip and snarls viciously. Every time he does it we tell him to get over it, but he never has.

In our big former home the two kittens on a tear had plenty of room to move, but in the cottage, every chase path invariably leads right over the top of Lucky, who explodes in a paroxysm of rage, panic, and barking.

Doesn't faze the kittens a bit. They scramble over him as if he were one of the better special effects in a horror movie.

For poor Lucky, though, this is real life, so, rather than yelling at him, we give him whatever comfort we can.