Turtle on the Highway
There is a great Canadian philosopher who said, "life is a highway". This replaces my previous favourite insight, "everybody's workin' for the weekend".
This apt metaphor came to mind as we drove home from the cottage and narrowly missed flattening a turtle. I looked over at Newman and suddenly realized the "safety gap" between our lives. Life for us humans is like that turtle on the highway. For Newman it's like a fully paid spa visit every day.
The biggest threat facing Newman on a daily basis is probably the toilet seat falling on his head. Sure, he's eaten and/or chewed chicken bones, sewing needles, door stoppers, furniture, shoelaces (just the aglets, actually) staples, paper clips, kleenex and toilet paper. But his titanium-lined stomach doesn't seem to complain much. Occasionally it puts up a fuss. One can push a stomach too far, you know. "What the hell are WE eating now", it asks. In disgust, the stomach ejects it, along with a little instruction booklet on what's allowed. Newman re-eats the offending item along with the booklet, sending a message to his stomach to be quiet or he'll eat it too.
I protect him from all the other dangers out there - cars, mean dogs, mean people, raccoons, vacuum cleaners, pylons, snowmen, my hair trimmer that I chase him with, and the Buckley's cough syrup that I present to him as food to watch his nose crinkle up at the vapo-rub smell. I mean, come on, Newman is really living la dolce vita.
For us humans, like the turtle, it's a slow crawl along a highway, mostly quiet, and punctured with impending doom, usually around rush hour. Take this weekend. A great friend was helping me set some concrete posts for our sleeping cabin. He has helped us so many times and we owe him in this lifetime and into the next two or three. So he asks me to take a huge drill (I thought it drilled oil wells) and drill some holes into the rock. This powerful drill chews through rock like a hot knife through something frozen hard. Its torque value is obscene. As I was drilling, and successfully too, the drill bit stopped spinning and the drill handle, along with my arm, started spinning. As I calmly assessed what was happening, I kept holding on to the power button. My arm looked like a phone chord and it was dialing 911 for pain medication. This is when my friend decided to tell me he's seen several people's hands almost come off using this drill. Be careful. Now my arm looks like a Popeye arm after ingesting a few cans of spinach.
It wasn't my friends fault. This is just another day on the highway. Danger zips by…quiet. Like the poor turtle. I'm sleeping in a freezer tonight to bring down the swelling so I can play Down by the Bay at the school. The children will probably call me Mrs. Popeye Arm, and I might even get a tattoo of an anchor on it.
So be careful on the highway of life, especially during rush hour. And whatever you do, watch out for turtles.
