VISION TALE

Talking with my upmountain neighbor the other day, he was out trimming snowbroken branches from the cedars and some from the oaks (the acorns do a day-and-night-drum-roll on his roof every autumn, something to think about if you're thinking of building near oaks) and I was out checking the shiitake for more buttons, getting some ginger (keeps real well when just left in the ground, I learned this year) and greens, and pondering a place for the bay tree, which is getting too big for its container, will have to be planted-- preferably soon-- when his and my paths converged near the tree line and he told me that the other morning he looked out his kitchen window at the back and there was a multipoint buck an arm's length away, eating acorns from the ground. Trying to be as quiet as possible, he ran for his video camera but when he got back the buck was gone. That's probably the same deerfellow that dined so crudely on my biwa tree.

I look out my windows all the time, seen monkeys, pheasants, ferrets, quail, mamushi, raccoons and rabbits, but I've never seen a deer. Or a bear or a wild pig, though they're around here too, and I'll probably see them all, sooner or later. But my neighbor, who has just moved here from the city, was way more excited by the encounter than the deer was, and now because he couldn't get his camera in time, when he visits his friends in the big urb he'll have to find the words to do the vision justice in telling them the story of his forest spirit, the same way such stories have always been told by seers vouchsafed visions, the tellers of tales to be remembered, for a million years before such stories led to us...

HOW GOLDEN ARCHES GOT HIS NAME

He had fasted for many days as he wandered the prairie naked, far from his tribe, seeking the vision that would make him a shaman. But he had heard no voice, only the sky-wide sweep of the prairie grasses, shoulder-high, whispering the long word of the wind. Then one evening as he stood on a low hill overlooking a broad plain covered with buffalo as far as the eye could see, he suddenly was able to look further, and envisioned a great chain of hamburger stands, highlighting the shoulders of six-lane expressways through a great, rich city rising higher and higher into the sky where junior executives from renowned universities worked at keyboards in cubicles among the clouds from 9 to 5 above a howling metropolitan area surrounded by vast stockyards linked to key railway connections festooned with wire that led off to other great cities and international airports. He envisioned a Pontiac dealership with many perks, and returned at once to his tribe to share his vision with the elders, who when he told them could not stop laughing; for what could possibly be the value of such mad visions? He was definitely not shaman material, they concluded, and assigned him the task of picking berries with the old women, who tagged him with the nickname he bore till the end of his days.