Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2005:<\/b> It’s only taken three decades to admit I’m a Westerner. That is, I began reading about Eastern religions in my pre-teen years. (It was the late 1960s and the Beatles were into the Maharishi, all reported in Time, Life<\/i> and the Arkansas Gazette,<\/i> received at the house.) My wife of late has been reading about Asia and its religions and cultures so I’ve been remembering my earlier and later conclusions.<\/p>\n
None of those is crisp enough for writing as yet.<\/p>\n
Still, last midnight in my bathroom after work, the main cat Tiki came to visit but ran out. Gentle Tiki is a former stray and is scared of no humans and precious little else. I looked around and behind the toilet was a filling Terminex insect monitor. This is a generic “Roach Motel” that we’re using for camelback crickets, which have invaded the lower level of our house, Shady Hill.<\/p>\n
Besides dead crickets, I quickly saw a large mass. At first it looked like a large garden slug (which are dark gray here in the Ozarks). What would that be doing in the house?<\/p>\n
Then it blinked.<\/p>\n
Slugs don’t do that.<\/p>\n
It looked like a stubby, baby snake. Maybe it had gone after a cricket, through the crawlspace, and got itself stuck in the glue on the cardboard. Its head was free but that was it, and barely alive.<\/p>\n
My options seemed minimal. Kill it in mercy, but how? Just put it in the outside garbage can, but that seemed more heartless. Pull it off the trap and injure it further? Cruel. I decided to put the trap and the critter in the grass near the carport door. Maybe that would spur it to pull itself out, damaging itself less than my heavy fingers, or even to be mercifully eaten by a possum or bird. Plus, I worried it was not a harmless garden snake and it would bite me.<\/p>\n
This morning I looked first thing. Indeed the animal had pulled about three-quarters of its six-inch body out — but it was still and its mouth hung open. No fangs. Plus two forelegs were out of the glue: Not a snake but a lizard of some sort. I looked again and the mouth had shut though the eyes were vacant.<\/p>\n
With two twigs I rocked its body out of the trap. It fell onto last fall’s leaves. I poured a little water from a nearby bucket on it. That might revive it. It went halfway under a brown oak leaf. I turned to get another scoop of water and found the lizard had disappeared. Victory!<\/p>\n
Who knows if its little legs would work well enough to give it something of a life, or if they were broken in its struggle, followed by my giant-like intervention. Have a good life, little guy. But couldn’t you have turned around and thanked me?<\/p>\n
That impulse is why I must resign myself to being an incorrigible Occidental. A pious Oriental Buddhist would have gone on living life, and helping other creatures as he or she came across them. -30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2005: It’s only taken three decades to admit I’m a Westerner. That is, I began reading about Eastern religions in my pre-teen years. (It was the late 1960s and the Beatles were into the Maharishi, all reported in Time, Life and the Arkansas Gazette, received at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-lessons"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":45,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/01\/taking-or-accepting-responsibility\/","url_meta":{"origin":124,"position":0},"title":"Taking, or accepting, responsibility","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"January 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Friday, January 28, 2005: Recalling a dream is not where I want to go with Brick. But what the heck. It's a Brick. It doesn't go anywhere until heaved. That's Krazy Kat's downfall, he realizes just as he sees one heading toward him from Ignatz\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":110,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/09\/falling-from-a-planes-easy\/","url_meta":{"origin":124,"position":1},"title":"Falling from a plane’s easy","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"September 21, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Book's as easy as falling out of a plane Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005. I own a lot of books, hundreds, and have read nearly all of them. 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Here is a lede that won't work in my eventual newspaper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":640,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2008\/08\/to-serve-dragon\/","url_meta":{"origin":124,"position":4},"title":"To Serve Dragon","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"August 26, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"(A reference to the Twilight Zone classic episode, \"To Serve Man.\") At Shady Hills, we worry a bit about the cats' diet since that canned-food scare last year. Most current pet food books recommend raw foods. After all, who cooked for Rosemary and Tiki in Fayetteville fields and alleys? Besides\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1913,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2010\/05\/simple-not-simplistic\/","url_meta":{"origin":124,"position":5},"title":"Lama-palooza III: Simple Not Simplistic","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"May 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock CEDAR FALLS, Iowa -- The appearances in Iowa of the exiled spiritual and political leader of China-controlled Tibet, the 14th Dalai Lama, had a successive feel: first a closed reception for a few dozen donors on Monday, May 17, a panel discussion the next morning,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Lama-palooza"","block_context":{"text":"Lama-palooza","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/briefs\/lamapalooza\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"UNI mandala destruction","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/brushoff_051910-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}