FIELD NOTES: Of Cows and Men

On my way to get a cup of coffee early Saturday morning, I came across a strange sight along a lonely stretch of rural road. A dead cow was lying in a shallow ditch just a couple of feet off the pavement. Several other cows grazed contentedly on the other side of an intact wire fence, oblivious to the fate of their fallen sister. I wondered what had happened. How did the cow escape the apparently undamaged fencing? How does a cow just drop dead along the side of the road? Do cows have heart attacks? I also wondered if anyone had informed the farmer and whether cows are insured against sudden death. But mostly, I felt bad for the deceased cow.

I passed the cow again later in the day. No one had made any obvious attempt to move it, and it occurred to me that a full-grown cow must weigh over a thousand pounds and would most likely require a front-end loader to lift it out of that ditch and onto a flatbed truck for a trip to the landfill or the rendering plant.

I was up in that neck of the woods celebrating my 60th birthday by clearing a plot of land where I hope to build a cabin one day. I welcomed my 40th birthday as finally reaching the age where people would take me seriously. I shrugged off my 50th, climbing Mt. Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, to prove I could still do anything my 40-year-old self could. But 60, that's a different number altogether. Sixty is old; no getting around it. One in ten Americans don't live to see their 60th birthday.

On Sunday morning, I attended a small country church within walking distance of my land. The mountains are peppered with these tiny spiritual outposts, spaced just a couple of miles from each other; a nod, I suppose, to the days before automobiles when the community walked or rode horses to Sunday services. I suspect the same dozen or so families have been attending that church since before my progenitors came to this country, and I wasn't entirely sure how they would react to an outsider.

They welcomed me with open arms, and while the service was somewhat different than what I'm used to, maybe that's a good thing. The preacher's sermon was on how we do not know the hour of our demise and tomorrow is not promised. It concluded with the story of a church member, "Jim."

"When Jim woke up on Friday, he didn't know he would be in a terrible accident. And when he left work at 2 a.m. Saturday morning, he didn't know what was waiting for him on his drive home. And when he hit that cow, black as night in the middle of the road, he surely wondered, is this the end? Is my time on this earth up? Now, Jim will be alright, but it could have ended very differently..." Well, one life mystery solved.

Comments

FRIDAY MATINEE: Midnight Mass (🍺🍺🍺🍺)

I held off writing this review until I had seen all seven episodes of the new Netflix limited series “Midnight Mass.” I’ve been burned in the past by shows that start out well and then devolve into silliness as they progress. While “Mass" doesn’t completely stick the landing, I think even the East German judge would give it a solid 9. Taken as a whole, I think it is as effective a piece of horror as the combined “It” movies from a few years ago, and right on par with “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.” The story revolves around a man returning to his childhood island home after a prison stay for a drunk driving accident that killed a teen girl. Coincidentally, it is the same day the island’s beloved elderly priest, Monsignor Pruitt is supposed to return from a trip to the Holy Land. Unfortunately, the priest has taken ill and is being treated on the mainland. A temporary priest arrives to take his place. The story takes a little while to get going, and anyone who’s familiar with t...

You Label Me, I'll Label You

Sometime around 1970, my parents acquired a "high tech" device known as a Label-It. Manufactured by the DYMO Corporation, the Label-It was an embossing tape printing system that produced a sticky-backed plastic strip onto which the user could custom-print words or short phrases; or for that matter I suppose all the great works of literature, given enough patience and an unlimited supply of tape. The Label-It was gun-shaped with a horizontal alpha-numeric wheel on top. You loaded a spool of plastic tape into the back and fed it through the embossing head. By arranging the wheel so that the desired number or letter was over the tape and pulling the "trigger," the head forced the tape against the raised character and, due the physical properties of the plastic, a white image of the character was transferred to the tape. When the entire word was finished, you hit the "cut" button and removed the label. It was fairly primitive by modern standards, but it was ...

FIELD NOTES: All corn is Indian corn

There's a good chance that when your family gathers (or gathered, depending on when you read this) around the table this Thanksgiving, one of the dishes set in front of you will be corn. Corn is arguably the most traditional Thanksgiving food, as it is one that we are sure was served at the original Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621. But the corn that the Wampanoag shared with the Pilgrims that day was very different from what you will put on your table. Corn was cultivated by the indigenous peoples of North America for more than a thousand years by the time the Pilgrims arrived. Originally a type of tall grass called teosinte with a dozen kernels no larger than the ball of a ballpoint pen, it was selectively bred over hundreds of generations until a handful of varieties resembling what we today call "Indian corn" were created. Technically, all corn is Indian corn since all of the varieties we grow today trace their roots back to those developed by Native Americans. The...

John B. Marek

Search This Blog