Lightning Fair

Two artifacts the wife & I stumbled upon while walking in our rented front yard. They were hidden amongst overgrown flower beds and tucked underneath cedar bird feeders on long stilts. From these two discoveries, a deduction: This home's previous owner was both an animal lover and a white supremacist.

It's always sad to stumble upon a pet's grave. I tend to imagine the seven year old boy or girl delivering the eulogy ("Boonie was a good hamster and a good friend") before using a coffee can to scoop red clay on top of a shoebox that will later be discovered and exhumed by nocturnal animals. Sad but cool.

Stumbling upon concretized racist stereotypes, on the other hand, somehow doesn't impart the same wistfulness...unless you are, in fact, a white supremacist, in which case I suppose, yes, your heart would probably leap with the good ol' fashioned joy of knowing you're not alone in your Sumpreme SnowflaKKKe ethos. As for me and the missus, we were pretty speechless.

Though they're not pictured here, this home is also equipped with about a million bird houses and bird feeders. There's also two homemade windmills that squeak like the devil whenever the wind blows. Clearly the old owner had a lot of time on his (her?) hands...

Back to those concrete statues, though: To say "man, that's really, really fucked up" is a start. I guess one of the most strange and sad aspects of it all is that there was once a lawn ornament manufacturer who churned this kind of thing out left and right. Not that long ago, either. What a way to make a living.

If you admit that you have done a horrible thing or let a horrible thing happen, there is, next, the living with what you have done. Not facing the fact that you have done a horrible thing, however, means a stilted kind of freedom that really only amounts to living in a cocoon of continual narcissistic self-deception. Lawn ornaments, apparently, factor into such a self-deception.

As for Lightning Fair, he was nothin' but a dog on God's green earth, free from the moral conundrums that plague men and women. He died in March of 2005 - three years ago exactly - and was laid to rest here, about seventy-five feet away from where I sit and type on this rainy Tuesday morn'.