The Tragedy of Being Human

 

Spring, but from the store

For many years – something like 30 – I was a vegetarian. The reason I was a vegetarian is because --- well, for many reasons, including the horrible way meat animals and farmed fish are raised and made ill in the process and horribly slaughtered, and because I couldn’t stand the idea of eating the flesh of another living being. Don’t argue with me, there’s a difference between animal flesh and plant flesh, even though we know, now, that plants aren’t the mindless beings we used to think they were.

I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian, which means I ate eggs (unfertilized) and drank milk and ate milk products. Back then, I wasn’t a Chinese medical practitioner so I couldn’t give you the reasons I can now for why I needed, for my own health, to eat those animal products. I also ate fish, on occasion, which I justified because “Maharishi said that cold-blooded animals forgive you for eating them.” (That means no karma accrues, in case that matters to you.)

About 25 years into being a vegetarian, I suddenly started to crave meat – mindlessly, obsessively, suddenly and mysteriously. I did my best to solve the protein urgency by paying extra careful attention to combining vegetables to make sure I was getting protein (dried legumes + grains = protein) and upping my intake of milk and cheese. I don’t love fish, but I tried eating it more often. All to no avail.

Vegetarians who eat no animal products and/or who are vegans, which is strictly limited vegetarian diet that is totally unhealthy, requiring taking supplements to provide what the body must have but can’t get through just vegetables and grains, lose the ability to produce the enzymes needed to digest animal products. By eating meat we slowly regain the ability, but need to back our digestive system up, until then, with fruits that help with digestion: pineapple and papaya being two. Otherwise, the animal products don’t get digested and make us ill. 

An egg for the birds

I didn’t have that problem but did have to go carefully when I finally decided my body was screaming something important at me; you can’t go from eating small amounts of more easily digested animal products to eating much more concentrated, harder to digest animal products without some digestive distress. First I tried eating more eggs and fish, and making sure I was having milk products daily. Didn’t help. Then I carefully added in just a little meat of various kinds in ways that were well-hidden: tacos, sloppy joes, stuff like that. Didn’t help. I then shut my eyes and ate what most carnivorous people eat, but drenched in sauces so I didn’t have to look ,at it and tried my best not to, think about it. This didn’t help, either. The craving or driving urge for meat only left me when I ate some elk meat, obtained from the freezer stores of my brother, who hunts. Just putting the elk into my mouth stopped the cravings immediately – it was as if my body and soul totally relaxed for the first time in years.

I can give you a dissertation on why that happened, but it’s not today’s point, so let’s move on.

Becoming a vegetarian, for me, was only a short step past my ancestors. My grandfather, who grew up in rural NH where most men went deer hunting in the fall, in those years, especially during the Depression, because of necessity, shot only one deer in his lifetime: it hurt his heart so badly to watch that deer die that he never went hunting again. His son never hunted either; both had their guns, as most men did, but they were used only for target shooting (which is fun, I grew up doing it) and taking pot shots at raccoons and (big mistake) skunks, etc, which were either trying to make off with the chickens or trash the trash can. My grandparents kept chickens for eggs, and never killed them for meat; their chickens died of old age or were picked off by the local wildlife.

My meat cravings started at about the same time I started studying to become a Chinese Medicine practitioner. The timing was coincidental, but now that I am one and have studied nutrition from a Chinese medical point of view, I can say why I started craving meat, and also why a vegetarian diet for most people, and all children, is a very bad idea. If you want to know why, ask me, I’ll be happy to give you that lecture. But for right now, just let me say that children should never be raised as vegans unless you want to doom them to certain illness in adult life; and if you can’t bear it, at least raise them as ovo-lacto vegetarians and trust that Maharishi was right about fish. And you adult vegans? Unless you’re very unusual, you’re going to suffer at least from digestive problems and at worst from early aging and other medical issues that you won’t connect to your diet, as you get older. And while I’m at it – you who have decided the total carnivorous diet fad is for you: enjoy your scurvy.

Anyway, to finish my personal story, I now eat meat. Not lots; not daily; and only thoughtfully.

Over-wintered parsnips are special and sweet

The main thing that came out of my turn from vegetarianism is the understanding that humans are different from animals, not in all the ways we used to believe – animals do think, they do form emotional attachments, they do communicate, they do experience fear and joy and all the emotions we used to think they didn’t and we do. Our real difference, as human beings? That we’re aware and capable of recognizing, and mourning, that our very existence on the earth means the destruction of other living beings. It’s a mystery, and an immortal sorrow, that I think only humans can – and should – experience. And we should experience it deeply and consciously: it’s the tragedy of being human.

That comprehension gives us the extra responsibility of doing no more harm than necessary – and being aware, always, and careful, always, of what we do and why we do it, and what we don’t need to do.

I got thinking about this again because I’m reading Tamed and Untamed, a collection of essays by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. These ladies currently live in Hancock and Peterborough NH, where I was living during the earliest period of my vegetarianism. Sy and Liz are naturalists; they’ve spent their professional lives studying, and writing about, animals and animal-human relationships. Both became vegetarians as a consequence. They love critters. They don’t want to eat the beings they love.

And all I can say is – their mentioning it tugged at my ex-vegetarian guilt strings, but in the end, vegetarianism is not the answer. I think these ladies are aware of that, if not consciously; but we all need to be aware. We are big beings with big abilities to create destruction against the earth and all its beings, including our own species, and we need to be aware. We need to know what trees think, and how, what mushrooms and mycelium do, and interact, and how, what all the beings that walk and fly and crawl and dig through the earth know and do and how we relate to each other. That might be the true work of people, which in the end will help us balance the true tragedy of being human.

It may be, in the end, the only thing that actually makes us human.

 

For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com    19 March 2024

All photos Deb Marshall

 

The kitchen pond in March - red-wing blackbirds, but no peepers yet

Marching On

 

The Buddha yesterday

Overnight, one day last week, the snow almost totally melted; and moved instead to my cellar in the form of 3 inches of water. Out my window it was grey and brown like November, with plowed-up piles of dirty snow, and in the house it was black and cursie accompanied by the groans elicited by aching backs, bailing, and fans blowing. No windy purr of dehumidifier – it took one despairing look and decided to die, almost immediately.

Last night it snowed again, about 4 inches, apparently in an attempt to replace the 3 inches of water we’ve mostly bailed out of the cellar. Out my window, it’s all white again. There are two bright dashes of cardinals in the lilac tree, which are playing some kind of touch tag, a herd of 6 red-winged blackbirds have taken over most of the porch railings to gobble seeds, and two or three bluejays are surprisingly politely staying at the far edges and eyeballing the herd warily. In the distance, the very loud sound of a woodpecker busily at work is rapping through the air. 

The Buddha today

The cats have asked to go out, about 9 times so far this morning. I open the door and they rush to it then put on the brakes, and stand in the door sniffing, sniffing, sniffing; then, giving me an accusing look – apparently I’m refusing to turn the switch that makes the ground dry and warm – they back up and stalk each other for a bit, then settle into an unhappy winter-ish nap until the call of the wild hurries them to the door again to consider venturing outside. It doesn’t help that they have to negotiate a wet cellar floor with surprise puddles to reach their litter boxes. At least today it’s just puddles, and not the in-house lake that was there the past two days.

The Husband just got over one of the nasty stomach bugs that’s going around and that, along with the other interesting pathologies making the rounds this season, has put him and a number of my patients to bed with headache, fever, and all the accompanying nastinesses; which so far I haven’t caught. Handwashing, face masking, disinfecting!

Lynxie Bob in basket

I’m still feeling sorry for myself, however, because I’m nursing a sore foot from an injury I gave myself almost two months ago, in a spectacularly complicated move I couldn’t repeat if I tried, attempting to extricate myself from a dining room chair without disturbing one of the cats. Essentially, no one knows what damage I did to my foot and leg or why it’s taking so long to heal; maybe I developed a syndrome my MD says only people with fractures or who just had surgery sometimes develop; maybe the arthritis in my low back and hips and ankle have something to do with it; maybe I slightly tore a muscle or overstretched a nerve or sprained or broke something small in my foot or ankle that the xrays couldn’t pick up and my chiropractor can’t locate…no telling. For almost 6 weeks I was able to sleep only 2-3 hours/night before either a massive muscle cramp woke me up and kept me awake; 2 more weeks I finally could sleep 5-6 hours/night before an aching aching aching woke me and kept me awake; for the past 3 nights, no cramp, no aching, just general discomfort after about 6 hours. Needless to say, I’m beyond exhausted and having a hard time making myself do the things that need doing, especially dealing with the remaining pile of paperwork that taunts me from my desk.

And then I remember that this time last year I was in F-FL with Cousin Paula and Deb the caregiver, moving my F-FL hoarder friend out of her house into assisted living, emptying the house, and selling it. And it was 90+ degrees down there every day and humid and kept raining, just to keep the humidity up. The only really bright notes that entire time was talking to the black bird who sat in a tree, near its usual perch on the telephone wires that the moving van managed to take down, and shouted “Fuck Fuck Fuck, Oh no Oh no Oh no!” every few minutes until the wire was put back in place; and seeing the peacock that haunts the downtown on almost the last day we were there. 

Tchatchke from F-FL

In the year since, the owners of the assisted living place have changed and the entire staff left and has been replaced, so none of them know us (Cousin Paula lives in IN). She’s on vacation right now, and on her way back home through F-FL, she’s going to stop at the assisted living place and try to put the Fear of God, or at least the Fear of Paula, into the new staff and my F-FL friend, who is still hoarding her way into homelessness in about 7 more years, if she doesn’t snap out of it.

I am so very glad not to be part of that expedition that I have moments when I’m not feeling sorry for myself!

Inside the tchatcke

Tired tired tired doesn’t make it easy to read, but besides treating patients, that’s all I’ve got energy for. And during this long-seeming time, I’ve fallen head over heels in love with Brian Doyle’s novels. Brian Doyle was a journalist who wrote a lot of books before he died, in 2017, of a brain tumor. He was my age; and I’ve read two of his books so far, Mink River, and Chicago. I fell in love with him when I read Mink River – it’s a book I wish I had written. I don’t know where I got the book, it wasn’t from my F-FL-F, might have been from the Five Colleges Book Sale last April, or maybe I picked it up off the Free Bench at the Tiptop – it was used, so it was a serendipitous acquisition, and it sat in my basket o’ fiction on the floor of my bedroom for months until I decided to tackle it, knowing nothing about it.

I was hooked. I was more than hooked. I immediately ordered Chicago, Martin Marten, and The Plover from Thriftbooks. I sent Mink River to a friend who I think will also love it; I’m 20 pgs from the end of Chicago, which I’ve promised to another friend; and I just ordered, omg, seven more of his books from Thriftbooks (for less than $50, I should mention).  I expect to stay bedazzled; the man was a wonder. His books are wondrous.  Finding them is wonderful. It will be hard to take a break from him to read some of the other books waiting for me, which may or may not be entertaining, but it would be hard for the good ones to live up to Brian Doyle!

On the shelves

Reading about his Chicago, I realized that I know nothing about the city except from reading Sinclair’s The Jungle, which is about the stockyards. Doyle’s Chicago is much more varied and interesting. I think I was in Chicago about 100 years ago when I was editing either computer magazines or ham radio magazine, for a tradeshow. All I remember is that the show was in a hotel near the airport, and we also stayed in that hotel; I vaguely remember that one or two of the other folks I traveled with went into the city for supper one night, but I didn’t go because I had no idea where to go or whether there was anything worth seeing in Chicago – turns out there’s a lot to see in Chicago! And I missed a chance to explore some of it.

I don’t think the trade show was the show in which an Asian someone vaulted over the table, where we had magazines on display, and landed on his knees in front of me, begging me to move home with him to Alaska because he’s been looking for me all his life, because I was his wife in a past life.

He’d put me through grad school, he’d build me a house, I could bring my husband and all my critters, he just wanted me to be near him; and over the next few days, he continued to plead, and he brought his current wife and daughter to assure me that he was for real and it was safe and they also wanted me to move to be with them.

I think that was in Rapid City, Iowa. I didn’t go.

Also on the shelves

Thinking about Chicago reminded me of a friend I’ll call Cliff, a computer techie who lived near or with the Husband and me, prior to our marriage and for awhile afterwards, until he moved to Chicago to become a richer techie with a job that was more techie than computer magazine techie.

Cliff was an interesting character: a total geek with a love of cars and motorcycles, who built a race car from scratch, rode a big motorcycle, and at one point owned a Land Rover. He had a cat named Agravaine (one of the Knights of the Round Table) who would  come when called and take a pill from Cliff’s hand and swallow it down, when he was sick.

Cliff was stocky and muscular and bearded; we once watched him pick up a motorcycle and lift it over the side of a truck to put it in the truck bed. He tried to date a friend of mine – we all worked, in our 20’s, for computer magazines, all in the same small NH town, and knew each other even though we worked for competing publishers.  My friend, who I’ll call Cat, was an artist for the publisher who owned the magazine I edited, and also loved cars and had a little racing car; we all hoped that Cliff and Cat would hit it off. On their first (and only) date, Cliff picked Cat up and put her on his lap. Cat was not amused.

“I thought women liked that sort of thing,” Cliff said, after the fireworks ended.

One early spring week Cliff disappeared. A week later, he called to let everyone know why he hadn’t been home, and hadn’t been in to work. “I couldn’t stand the winter anymore,”  he said, “so I got on my motorcycle and headed south to find spring. It was warmer in Massachusetts, so I kept going. It was snowless in Connecticut, so I kept going. It was even more like spring in New York, so I kept going. Before I knew it, I was in Florida.”

It took him another week to get back to NH and late winter, and by the time he arrived, he’d had to replace several of the rocker box tops on his motorcycle that had blown up, by wiring on Coke cans in to replace them.

I wonder how he likes Chicago, and if he’s still there.

Someday maybe I’ll see that Lake which is more like an Ocean. I bet I’ll like it better than the one in my cellar.

Ya never know…

 

 For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com       10 March 2024

All photos Debra Marshall

 

 

Window tchatckes with winter behind them - again!