Daddy Days: Living a modern fable-tale
Western culture has largely lost an appreciation for stories with a moral. Simple fables in support of the cardinal virtues have been swapped out for movies and social media overflowing with a choose-your-own morals mentality. The result is the disordered chaos of our pop culture and a lot of kids growing up with no sense of direction or purpose.
OK, these are kind of deep thoughts to start a column with, but I think about this kind of thing and was doing so on a drive when an idea for a story struck me. Here’s the story.
There once was a happy cardinal living in a small patch of woods in Central Texas. He would spend his days singing in the trees, flirting with female cardinals, and catching little grasshoppers. The wooded area he lived in abutted a field rife with young grasshoppers. They were quite small but in exceptional abundance and his next meal was as regular as the morning sunrise.
One day, while flying around the field he spotted a much larger grasshopper than he had ever seen before. Using his keen bird eyesight, he estimated it to be nearly a quarter of his own size. A verifiable cardinal feast. He flitted over to a fence post in the barbed wire fence at the edge of the field and along a blacktop highway. There was his prey, sitting unaware in the sun on a piece of grass.
As the grasshopper launched into the sky and began to fly, the cardinal took off in pursuit. He flew past hundreds of smaller grasshoppers and toward the blacktop in single-minded pursuit of this enormous grasshopper. And then he was struck by the bus that is our family van that I was driving.
I saw a flash of faded yellow and then bright red feathers and knew we’d hit a cardinal. What I didn’t know until 60 miles later was that the cardinal was stuck in the grill of the van flat as a pancake. I guess 6,000 pounds at 70 mph will do that to a bird. People were staring and laughing at our unique hood ornament long before I knew it was there.
When I went to see what everyone was looking at, guess what I found stuck in the grill of the van just in front of the cardinal? A fat grasshopper. I decided to name the cardinal Dives and create a backstory for him. You just read it.
But really, when this sort of thing happens, it always seems ripe for a moral. At a minimum it doesn’t take much creativity to see a cautionary tale in a bird chasing a large grasshopper across a highway. I mean, it’s basically "Moby Dick" but on the Edwards Plateau instead of the ocean.
In the end the moral is not a new one: Be content with what you have. And don’t chase grasshoppers across the highway.
Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their six sons. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns to thoughtsforcaleb@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Daddy Days: Living a modern fable-tale
