[Cont.]
Look: our pigs are using their snouts to turn up the ground from the front yards of the houses nearby. This process is known as “rooting”. Guessing that they’re hungry, Jeanette and I reach into the pockets of our eveningwear and cast broadly to our herd any sustenance that we find there — we toss out mealie-pap, bread, vegetables, fresh fruit, some cabbage, and a small quantity of grass cuttings. Our cheerful hogs love it: They eat it right up.
After feeding our pigs all the scraps and leftover food that we happened to have in our pockets, we walk back to our house.
As we near the top of our hill (Jeanette and I live with Anna Karina, Monica Vitti, and Fernando Pessoa, in a rambler house on a steep hill in Eagan, Minnesota — we are all suburban herdsmen), I look back and note that our swine are satisfied with what we have fed them. You can tell that they’ve had their fill because now the pigs are just playing with the rest of the food, standing in it and soiling it. This extra nourishment is going to waste — but that’s OK because we live in a world of abundance.
“Hey guys!” say Anna and Monica and Fernando when we get back home after dealing with The Burning Buick Incident. “Where did you two go?”
“We met a man who tried to drive his car on the streets of the neighborhood at the same time when our hogs were out foraging,” answers Jeanette. “The poor fellow was returning from playing the stock market or renting a VHS cassette or something, and our pigs showed him love; but he returned their affection with opprobrium and kept shouting vile threats, therefore the LORD caused the earth to swallow him.”
“By the hinds of the field!” sez Fernando Pessoa; “that is horrendous!”
“Yeah, that’s the breaks,” I say. “What have you all been up to?”
“We spent the whole morning trying to coax one of the camels away from Bruce’s place,” sez Anna Karina. “You know Bruce — he has the house diagonal to Joe’s there. Well Bruce just finished applying a sealcoat treatment to his driveway, and then our herd of camels came traipsing over the horizon from where they’d been grazing near the parking lot on the other side of Pilot Knob Road; and they ended up taking a path of travel that went straight thru Bruce’s property, so they trampled over the sealcoat and unfortunately left it imperfected. And one of the younger camels liked the driveway so much that he decided to stay there. We kept trying to get him to join the rest of the herd, by giving him the signal that meant “stand up and follow us”; but every time he would rise to his full height, Bruce would laugh, because camels look so funny, and this would distract the attention of our stray, so he would kneel back down again and rest; thus infesting the black sealant with his tan camel-hair, while befouling his tan camel-hair with black sealant.”
“Ay me!” I exclaim. “Your mission sounds like it was even more impossibler than ours.”
Jeanette is in awe: “And how did you remedy this dilemma?”
“All we did,” explains Monica Vitti, “is lasso a rope around the baby camel’s neck and give it a very gentle tug. Our boy trotted over to us immediately, and we led him back to the herd. We had to spray him down thoroughly with the garden hose — it took about forty-five minutes — but he’s clean now. Then Anna and Fernando and I all saddled up three of our camels and took a trip over to the Home Supplies Store. We bought several buckets of sealant, as well as a few large squeegee tools and some application brushes; and we reapplied a whole new sealcoat to Bruce’s driveway. So it’s nice and smooth now. He was happy with the result. Bruce is a nice guy; he came out and chatted with us while we were working; and he even joined in and helped us quite a lot. Ooh, and it also turns out that he’s a fan of the book Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s epic novel — isn’t that one of your favorites, too, Bryan?”
“O my gosh, I love that book,” I say.
“Yeah, and it turns out that Bruce also likes a variety of other things — trains, biking, exotic foods, woodworking… We learned a lot, just interacting with him on the job. He knows a whole lot of interesting stuff.”
Jeanette smiles: “I think we picked a decent neighborhood to become herdsmen in.”
And we all agree.
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