As kids every couple of weeks
we’d take our allowances,
go down to the variety store
and buy the latest DC comic.
Larry and I would spend
that afternoon imagining
we were whatever superhero
was featured in our new,
and now most prized book.
Jimmy was with us
all the way, but admitted
he wanted to be Lex Luthor or
or the Joker, or better still
Solomon Grundy.
So we probably should not
have been surprised that
while I became a lawyer
and Larry a classics professor,
Jimmy became a politician.
It was Salvador Dali who once said:
“Have no fear of perfection,
you’ll never reach it.”
It might have easily have been
my creative writing professor
in College, although he would
have added, “and in your case
I doubt you’ll ever get close.”
Well over time I have
certainly proved Dali right,
although I’d like to think
the esteemed professor
missed the mark, but
as Cage said, Nicolas
not John, “Nobody
wants to watch perfection.”
He said the assignment is
an easy one for this class,
write a piece, poem or story,
your choice, but focused
on a single metaphor. Oh,
and to make it interesting,
that metaphor should be
the last pet you owned or
currently own, and if you’ve
never been blessed with a pet,
use an ocelot or a lynx.
How hard could it be, I thought,
I have a cat, she will be
my metaphor, and so I sat,
picked up pen and paper
and absolutely nothing came.
The cat watched me, heard me
mutter under, I thought,
my breath, then gently mewed:
“Cats cannot be metaphors,
you should know that, for we
are unique in nature, unless
of course you wish to write
about God, for we know that we
were created in his image.
It was approaching the end
of another too long semester
and the sign-up sheet for office hours
was getting fuller with names
I didn’t recognize, or did and not
in a way that would please the student.
It was always like this, the two weeks
after it was too late to do anything,
when the pleading would begin.
I remember being in that position
almost fifty years ago, making my
supplication for relief of some kind
to a professor I had ignored all term,
and he, genial and gentle, taking out
pictures of the rice paddies
and saying to me, you stand
a far better chance in the Air Force.
There are no wars now that I can offer,
and so I tell them the bad news,
but add that Starbucks can
be a career of sorts, with benefits.
For Something Different, a new bird photo each day, visit my other blog:
Bird-of-the-day.com
an old writer and his words 