Dude

I fed a mango to a pig named Dude this morning in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, way back by the railroad tracks that border the edge of the Mississippi River. You should have seen the way that overripe mess hung from the clinging pig’s lips or heard the way he whined and moaned as i walked toward him. If I remember correctly, somebody took on this pig for a pet and never realized that he would get so big.

Dude is fat. He embodies the word pig. And when he’s around, the chickens sneak quick bites from whatever food is left. I don’t think Dude would ever let one of them ride on his back. I don’t think that Dude would choose to be with two goats and a dozen chickens were he given other options. 

I could see him in a hay living room with another big pig named Baby. Maybe Baby Girl. She would be a little smaller than Dude. She wouldn’t mind the way he eats because her eating might be the same. They might even have a litter of pig babies and a place where the two of them might go to get away from these babies on the weekends. You know how suckling pigs can be. And the exhaust that might come into Baby Girl would surely be felt by Dude.

The mind is an interesting specimen, in that I never could have predicted I would be thinking these thoughts this morning. I walked toward the river to add my thumbprint to a lock controlled by an app on a phone, and along the way saw Jacob of Two Tall Farms. I think we will help each other in the future. I think his success will be mine and mine his. When I asked him how he was doing, he said busy, and something about the grind.

I wonder about that word. With coffee beans it is to break down into a powder that might be mixed with water. With wheat, the same thing. People used to use big stone wheels to make flour. People take what is whole and make this into bits. Is this what we are doing when we go back to the daily grind? Taking the whole of ourselves and breaking down into bits that make us more convenient for the world to consume?

Dude belongs to a church. Not that the pig chose his own denomination. Or even that the church chose him. They just had extra land and were willing to take him in. I have known the good people of this church for years. I have benefitted from the use of their hoop house for awhile now, and I have helped them around their plot of land.

I have worked with a man named Larry, a man twenty years my senior, to attach bungee cords to keep the visqueen safe after hurricanes. I have worked with him to pull shade cloth over the sides in the hot heat of summer. And I have done most of the ladder work because I am more limber.

Today Teresa told me that Dude bit Larry. She said Larry was trying to get the goats back inside the gate and something about this offended Dude so that he bit the back of Larry’s leg.

“It’s tougher for him,” she said, “because he’s older, and he has diabetes.”

I get the older part as far as healing, but did not know that diabetes makes a pig bite worse, so I said, “Yeah.”

I asked if I might help with anything after getting my fingerprint into the padlock. She said she most needed help with the compost, with all the produce she got from a grocery store.

“You can take some of the good stuff with you,” she said.

“I’ll take some for me and some for the chickens.”

I read somewhere that the United States throws away forty percent of the food grown here. I read elsewhere and have heard about the daily grind. I have received two calls today, two different men, who both spoke about their minds, about the desire to stay present, to be with what is. 

It is said that we have sixty thousand thoughts a day. If ninety-five percent of these are unconscious, why is it we so often grip onto them? Is this an attempt to grind what is fine whole? Is this an attempt to make my thinking palatable? Is this an attempt to sort, to categorize, to conceptualize what just happens?

I’m not sure. I do know this. Sometimes I am amused by my thoughts.

Take this one. You know those old spy movies where somebody is kidnapped because they need their prints to open a safe?

On my way back from the space where Dude lives I considered a scenario where his pig people heard about this new lock and in some kind of strange Orwellian twist, they kidnapped me, used my fingerprints, freed Dude, and then ground me into dust.