Adrian Pearson - Cow Country

“Yes?”

“Charlie, now that it’s Christmas isn’t there something you want to tell me?”

“Of course.”

“So what is it…?”

“Merry Christmas!”

“No, not that. You already said that. I mean is there something you have to say for yourself?”

“About what?”

“Well, about the world we live in? About that calf we castrated, for example? Anything along those lines that you’d like to tell me?”

“You mean the metaphor we squeezed out like prunes from a package?”

“Yes. What is the metaphorical significance of it all, if there even is one?”

“Oh, there is ! There most definitely is one alright! There is metaphor in everything. That is a truth I’ve learned since coming here. It is one of the many lessons I’ve acquired.”

“So what is it then?”

“The lesson?”

“No, the metaphor? What then is the metaphorical significance of the calf?”

“I’m not sure, sir. In fact, I was sort of expecting that you might have forgotten about it….”

“I may be old but I’m not senile! I may be retiring but I’m not retired. Not yet anyway. Things are happening very quickly, Charlie, so I think I’d better ask you now; otherwise, given how things are unfolding, I may not get another chance. So what’s the metaphorical significance of the calf in the corral? Or rather, wait….no…let me do this the right way! Which is to say…if the corral is our college, the dirt is our revised mission statement, the fences are attempts to mitigate our humanity, the bus is our collective destiny, the driver is hopelessly lost, and the self-study we’ve concocted is our submission to the higher authority of an alien body of like-minded yet data-conscious accreditors….if all of this is true, then what, Charlie, is the calf whose testicles you ate on that moonlit night down by the river…?”

I nodded gravely.

“It’s a good question,” I said. “And a timely one.”

“So what is it then?”

“The calf is you and me.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Dr. Felch. And me. It’s both of us.”

“Together?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you care to explain?”

“I’ll try. You see, the calf’s position in that corral, I think, represents our metaphorical ascension as educational administrators. It is the culmination of our collective trajectory. It is the summit of our legacy. No matter how much we excel….no matter how far we climb in the arena of educational administration, we will never be anything more than a calf chewing the hay next to the trough of intellectual enlightenment. No matter how high we rise as a people we can never rise any higher than those boards that run around the corral of our hearts like arbitrary boundaries between nations of the world.”

“That’s not very encouraging, Charlie.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s downright depressing.”

“But it doesn’t have to be! It doesn’t have to be depressing at all! If you look at it differently this is not a bad thing by any means. It’s just a necessary evil. Because what kind of world would it be if the community college’s calves jumped out of the corral whenever they felt the urge? What kind of a world would that be?!”

“Okay. I can see that. I’ll buy that the calf might be your typical community college administrator. That it might be the world’s quietly suffering professionals. But how about the testicles themselves? What are they ?”

“They are scrumptious!”

“Yes, of course. That statement is true a priori . But metaphorically what are they?”

“Well, Dr. Felch, I haven’t honestly thought much about this question. It’s been a while since I’ve had to. But if I were to venture a guess on the matter, I would have to say that in the complicated metaphor that is our community college — and my goodness is it complicated! — those testicles that you held up in the Ziploc bag — and that I unwittingly consumed the following day — are the remnants of our humanity….”

“They are?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all that remains?”

“Pretty much.”

“But there were two of them!”

“Oh right. Well in that case maybe they are the dual tendencies of conflict and conciliation. The two go together, you see? We tend to perceive them as separate things. But no! They are one and the same! And when we sever one, we sever the other with it. And in this way we sever those very things that allow us to function as living, feeling, procreating human beings. But with these things removed we will never know the offspring of our actions — the legacy that we might have left. The legacy that will never be inherited from the fruitless historian. Or the childless administrator. Or the unpublished novelist. Instead we will be left to jog off to our unknown fates with the stream of blood trailing after us in the dirt….”

I stopped to watch my words trail off in the dirt. Dr. Felch was regarding me curiously. Grabbing the napkin from under my empty martini glass I said:

“It’s like this….” And fumbling for a felt pen from the pocket under my chaps I drew the following with an impassioned yet unsteady hand:

“Do you see?” I asked.

“See what?”

“The confluence?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Here, look again….”

And using the felt pen I added an imperfect circle of life:

“Get it?”

“Get what?”

“We!”

“We?”

“Yes, we ! You see, Dr. Felch, that’s the key! It all comes down to how we define that word. For some it will be a religion, for others a race. For some it will be a nation, a country, a polity — while for others it will be their family or their neighborhood. Or their football team. Or the color of their favorite political party. Or a gender. Or a sexual proclivity. Or even a deeply held leaning in the great North Dakota vs. South Dakota conundrum. And, yes, for those of us working at a community college it may very well be our professional affiliation….”

“The trade we ply?”

“Right. A human being without a we is not a human being. And so we manufacture them. We plant these markers deep into the ground like marble pillars along the prairie.”

“Which is somewhat inevitable, right?”

“Perhaps. Except that in order for there to be a we , there also has to be a they ….”

“The othe r?”

“The outsider.”

“The red cows?”

“Right.”

“Looking mournfully upon the others.”

“Correct. And yet if you look at all these intersections of human experience — all the occasions to invent yet another we — an interesting thing comes to light. You see, if culture itself is shared experience creating different planes of culture, an interesting paradox emerges….”

And here I flipped over the napkin and began to draw circles on its back. One after another, I drew the intersecting three-dimensional planes of human experience that so contribute to our very personal notions of we . Circle after circle after circle after circle after circle after circle after circle. Relentlessly I drew. Desperately I drew. As if possessed, I struggled to articulate the infinite circles of experience that make up the rich culture of Cow Eye Community College. “This is Rusty’s religion….” I would say and draw an imperfect circle: “….and this is Gwen’s spirituality…..” Nationhood. Race. Gender. Age. Passionately, I drew these affiliations one on top of another until the napkin had become a collection of sopping blotted ink. “This is the story of darkness our parents used to tell us,” I said. “…And this is the place in the river where our fathers once took us fishing….”