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It is Only Natural

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe
that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"*


 
I have begun to wonder if there is a tangled set of genes
that needs to know that there are garden fairies and tooth fairies,
and orcs and wargs and elves and hobbits and gods.


 
I have some sympathy with that peculiar damage to our genetic instructions
because, personally, I have no problems believing in Santa Claus.
And maybe garden fairies.


 
(O.K.! I lied about the Santa Claus and garden fairy part.)


 
It was rather odd to listen to the funeral proceedings for Ted Kennedy.
The language was the language of traditional Christianity,
full of ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and of rising from the dead.
I kept looking at the family members, and realized that they were, indeed,
practicing Catholics who really did believe in heaven and hell,
at least in some sanitized sense.


 
Ted Kennedy was seventy-seven years old, and like many of us mortals,
had learned how to make something really good of his life.
He will be remembered as one of the finest Senators in our history.
He had lived a reasonably long life, and now he had died.
It was not enough to say that, and to celebrate it.
They had to say there were fairies at the bottom of the garden.


 
There are people who say they have seen fairies,
or who have talked to leprechauns. I may have caught a glimpse
of Santa Claus myself, or heard him on the roof, when I was a child.
I think I have nearly figured out the whole tooth fairy thing.


 
But, as we have just seen, when people attend a funeral,
and talk about rising from the dead,
about how they shall soon have glorified bodies
and look down, nearly forever, at the kids or the Boston Red Sox,
or live forever at the bottom of the garden,
no one says we have all gone bonkers.


 
I have been standing on our deck, looking down
at the long stream of wildflowers winding through our garden.
They are beautiful, but I can see that it is late in the season.
But that is only natural.


 
*Douglas Adams, writer, dramatist, and musician (1952-2001), cited on Wordsmith.org
___________________________________________________________
Also available, with earlier posts, on http://smokesound.blogspot.com ,
to say nothing, or even less, of my picture.

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