Comments on: Life and Death

by: Narya

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:11:02 +0000

thanks for sharing this, Larry (and the rest of you, too).

My nephews are getting a different lesson–my brother hunts, and my older (11) nephew does, too, now, though he didn’t get a deer his first time out. They’re certainly learning that things die, and that, if you’re going to eat them, the dying is part of it, but I’m hoping they don’t learn it from the guilt that results from casual cruelty.

Lessons about our own power (and weakness) are always difficult.

by: Ron

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:55:15 +0000

You don’t have to kill to show a disregard for life. As a teenager, I decided that the gerbil craze going on was just the thing for me and I ended up with two of them in a glass case like an aquarium (but no water). I put them in my bedroom. Everything went fine until I realized they were nocturnal and I had to listen to them scritch-scritch all night long as they played about in their straw or whatever it was. I’d go shake their little box angrily as if they’d know I’d been asleep and they should feel guilty! I’m sure they only felt terrified. And they only quieited down for a little while. I don’t know how many nights of this occurred before I had the sense to stop torturing them and give them away! I don’t think that it’s much of an expiation to know NOW how wrong that was. It wasn’t many years later that I learned of J.D. Salinger’s quote about how it was well enough that authors would CONFESS to such adult things as cheating on a college exam, etc. but he wanted to know how often anyone confessed how in a fit of pique he’d murdered his pet hamster!!! I knew I was a criminal, then.

by: Wren

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:13:24 +0000

And not only little boys, Bill. I think it simply takes most children of both genders a while to get a mental grasp of what death is, even without the complexities we attach to the same concept as adults. As a five year old, I found a baby bird. A sparrow, I think, though my memory isn’t real clear on that. It was summer, and I had a red wagon that I filled with water from the hose. I put the little bird in the water, thinking it would swim like a duck. When it didn’t I tried to teach it. That poor baby bird spent hours in those five inches of cold hose water being handled by a child. It died, finally. I was horrified. And it was then that I realized that life could be ended. I felt terrible about that little bird and never told my parents what I did, but like Larry and his frog, I’ve never forgotten it. My whole worldview — including the discovery that life is very fragile — was formed that day.

by: Bill Stankus

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:52:56 +0000

It’s curious, how childhood epiphanies arise every now and then. We may go decades before they re-speak to us and sometimes they linger from the moment of the initial triggering. Our brain is a curious place, a stuffed hallway closet and crammed bookshelf of odds and ends. From it all, we somehow develop personal values as life-lessons and haunting experiences drive us forward.

I have memories of senseless BB gun adventures., mostly I plinked at small lizards in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the one and only time I shot a bird I was instantly engulfed with guilt, grief and an instantaneous resolve to never do it again. And I never did.

Too bad so many living things have had to die in order for little boys to “get” the value of life.

by: Larry Jones

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:59:18 +0000

Adorable G’friend - I was sort of thinking mainly of myself and my little lesson in life when I wrote this, but yes, thank you for expanding the theme.

by: Adorable Girlfriend

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:20:25 +0000

Yep, another Superfund site that we tax payers pay for while companies continue to profit!