Library Lion

This afternoon as I left the library, one of the two huge concrete lions lying on either side of the entrance hopped down and loped alongside me; his paw pads were inaudible as his muscular stride kept up effortlessly with my half-century-old saunter. After a while I realized it was silly walking when he might bear me, so I asked respectfully whether he would accept a rider, and he responded in a mannered voice, “Why, yessir, I will gladly carry you to your destination.” I crawled up onto his ample back and he dashed down the street, taking me to my front porch in an instant. At the house I fed him a gallon of iced, honey-sweetened Earl Gray tea and two roasted chickens in the dining room, and when he had finished lunching, he covered his mouth with a polite paw while picking his teeth with a sharpened broomstick. Then he lay out in the backyard in a patch of sunlight. The regular cats hissed and arched their backs at him, but he ignored them. Then they settled down, sniffed his mouth and bottom, and curled just out of his reach. I took a library book outside, sat with my shoulders against the lion’s back, and read Asian stories. I cursed myself for saying no over the weekend to a book of collected Chinese stories, figuring I might find in them a solution to the mystery of my leonine companion, but what’s done is done.

I am not in possession of myself. Every moment time changes me. Every single nanosecond I am being altered — whether I agree to it or not — if only by the constant rearrangement of quarks in the universe. Anyone who fails to recognize this is either hopelessly arrogant or a fool. Or both. That’s the reason, long ago, I divorced Ayn Rand, and why, to this day, I accept the animation of concrete lions as fact and not fiction. The earth and all its physical laws and precepts are continually evolving. Tomorrow fish will fly and birds will swim.

And one day I’ll reach up into the air and defy gravity.

Then you can color me G-O-N-E.

This was howled on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:46 pm and is part of the Uncategorized genus. You can follow responses to this howl through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.