LIFE AND DEATH

I wish I could write something wonderful right now, but I can't, and I'll tell you why.  

Just the other day, as I was walking down the street with my younger brother we saw a squirrel.  The squirrel, with its bushy, lovable tail, its curious eyes, and its busy hands wiping its jittery, little nose like Sigmund Freud - the famed neurologist and founding father of psychoanalysis was a notable proponent of cocaine and experimented with the drug quite frequently.  Once, he wrote to his stunningly average looking wife, Martha, "If all goes well, I will write an essay [on cocaine] and I expect it will win its place in therapeutics by the side of morphine and superior to it... I take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against indigestion and with the most brilliant of success."  The man was a genius, and a coke head.  The squirrel was cute, they always are, and as he clung to the tree, I realized that I'd never seen a squirrel die - I'd never seen any animal die.  Animals, to me, and I'm sure millions of other people, were immortal.   I thought of my younger brother. How did he understand life and death?  I truly don't even understand it, so how could he?   

Then, as if manifested from the seeds of my dark thoughts, a feline, a bobcat, a lion, a tiger, pounced from a bush and wrapped its off-white, borderline yellow fangs around the neck of the squirrel.  The collarless cat retreated to a nearby alleyway where I'm sure he or she devoured the remains of the once cute squirrel.  My brother and I stopped. He looked at me and I looked at him. Our minds raced but no words were said - we didn't understand what to do next. We didn't know how to deal with such a sudden burst of death.  The problem was quickly resolved as a white van drove by, its driver side window rolled down.  The driver wore sunglasses and a backwards white hat, a little tuft of his hair poking through the window where the strap met the actual cap - he looked like one of the kidnappers from the 3 Ninjas.  The man thrust his fist out the window and into the air, as he yelled, "That was awesome! Are you kidding me?"  And then he was gone.  

Like the squirrel, he was gone. My brother and I walked on. We ate sandwiches for lunch.  At one point, our silence was broken by our laughter.  It's still hard to know if that really happened - dreams, like cats, are hunters....preying on reality.