PG 13

Ingredients: 99 % Shards of Fun Sponge , 1% wry humor.

Caution: Graphic images are summoned.

My son, who knows a lot about these things, explained to me how if someone gets caught in the teeth of an industrial-sized chipper, he or she or they must reach for The Last Chance Cord located at the mouth of the machine. Pulling the cord reverses the direction of the gears and can save the careless operator from being….well, from being added to the woodpile. But if both hands go in first, explained Matt, well, you’re pretty much done.

This topic came up because we were talking about movies. The conversation included the graphic scene in Fargo when Steve Buchemi is fed through such a device to conceal the evidence of his murder, which led to my son describing how awkward he felt one night while helping a friend move as he carried a box into the street that contained the appendages of a mannequin. Arms and legs sticking out, cameras on…it just felt creepy.

But back to the Last Chance Cord.

I see everything as a metaphor these days.

What’s America’s Last Chance Cord? The ballot box?

Matt described a fatality on a job site where the victim of the chipper was in his first day on the job. His first day. Apparently, in his enthusiasm to feed the machine, his arm got caught and since he’d not been trained to operate the machine safely and had no awareness of The Last Chance Cord, he was soon…well, gone.

I see everything as a metaphor these days.

Where do we train our fellow citizens in citizenship? How can we expect our fellows to save themselves – and us- in the ballot box if we do not afford them the proper training in citizenship?

Plato allegedly said, What’s honored in the country is cultivated there.

Sure makes you thimpk.

Last night we were sitting on the porch. It was a perfectly still night, but nine miles away the town of Bolton Landing was setting off fireworks. Small mushroom clouds of red and green and sparkling incandescence rose silently from the horizon. I asked Peg if she wanted to go up to the boathouse roof to watch the distant show, but she expressed what I was feeling at that moment, too. The hollow patriotism. The environmental damage. The cultural self-absorption. Expensive celebratory explosions in the sky while so many suffer.

I’m not the only one seeing things as metaphors these days.