Preparing to get Dot Earth back into gear after longest hiatus ever - a week break in Maine and a week of moving - clicked back to puberty on the scale of a planet, including this memory of shooting a songbird when I was 12.. ~~ One winter when I was 12 or so, growing up in a Rhode Island suburb, a friend invited me over to his house to try out his BB gun. My dad had one on the small sailboat we cruised around in during the summer, which we used to perforate tossed soda cans so they would sink to the seabed. (This was before recycling.) Behind his house, Doug and I crouched on the cement steps leading from the basement with a different intent. We took turns aiming at the chickadees and titmice that flitted in the trees and on the clothesline strung in his back yard. I pulled the trigger. A ball of feathers fluttered wildly and fell to the snow, flinging flecks of blood and downy tufts in every direction on the whiteness before it lay still and died. Every detail of that little murder was welded indelibly in my brain. I have great respect for the hunters I know who hone their woodcraft carefully and shoot to kill –- and eat. But after I shot that bird, I never shot at a living thing again. dotearth.blogs.nytimes/2009/08/07/puberty-on-the-scale-of-a-planet/
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 02:08:08 +0000
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